


The Monsters are Due on Maple Street

by nimmieamee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Gangs, Hazing, Murder, Terrible Parents, bisexual FP Jones, stolen money, undeserved awards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-07 09:43:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12230352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: Alice was thirteen when she chose Hal Cooper. FP was there when it happened. FP was always there, laughing into a corner of his jacket or skulking around by the garbage cans or something. Other girls seemed to find it exciting.For a little while, Alice would find it much, much more than exciting.





	1. Eyes. Hair. God. Legs.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cassanovic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassanovic/gifts).



> This is for cassanovic for the Riverdale fic exchange. I hope you enjoy it, cassanovic! There are probably other ways to tell this story, but this is the way it occurred to me. This takes place in the early 90s or else the late 80s, with one scene borrowed from Dazed & Confused, which of course takes place in the 70s. So, really, the exact time is unclear to me and there may be several anachronisms. You should attribute those to the fact that in Riverdale it can snow in September, most people seem to have bought their cars in the 50s, and spring sugaring season occurs in the autumn. Time in Riverdale just isn't real. 
> 
> Also, huge, HUGE thanks to [Yavannie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yavannie/pseuds/Yavannie) for all her tireless help with this fic. Several sections of this were senseless or clunky when I handed them to her. She handed me back the means to fix them. So if you like it, please note that some of the credit is rightfully hers.

It was sleeting and bitterly cold the day Alice Smith chose Hal Cooper.

It was the day after New Year's, the day they shut down the holiday fair. That fair was a seasonal bother. Girls like Hermione Rivera and Mary Mayberry got to enjoy it, got to wander from stall to stall picking up trinkets for their families and friends. Alice never had the time. Every year, the Smith aunts worked the fair. They ran a fortune telling booth. It was Alice's job to sit under the table and knock at the right times, producing by a series of taps long-lost brothers or ominous prophecies for the year to come. 

Lies. Five dollars a session. 

Until the day after New Year's, when everyone packed up. The music turned into shrieking buzzsaws. Booths and tents and signage -- all chopped up and ripped down. Hermione Riveras and Mary Mayberrys -- nowhere to be seen. They were warm and safe inside somewhere, admiring or maybe breaking their new Christmas presents. 

It was on this day, the last day of the fair, that Hal Cooper showed up. Solid and blond, with extremely white teeth. All the Coopers were like that. They were an Ovaltine-golfing-Reader's Digest family, famous for their yearly Christmas cards with all the Cooper boys sitting cross-legged in front of the tree in matching masculine pajamas. Their trees were always themed: green Christmas, gold Christmas, reindeer Christmas with every ornament a reindeer. Never the same theme twice.

The Coopers never came to the fair. They shopped exclusively at the big department stores in Centerville. But this year Hal and his brothers came to see everything demolished. 

"They had a fortune-telling booth," said Hector Cooper.

"I wanted to see the fortune-telling booth," complained Harry Cooper.

Hal said, dismissive, "It's lies. They all lie. They put someone under the table to rattle and make noise, and then they tell you it's your dead mother or something."

Alice didn't know Hal that well yet. Just knew that he sat with the boys who didn't look at her, that he marched past her every day on his way to auto class and still didn't know her name. But in this instant she chose him. She liked his solid assurance. She liked that he could spot the lie. She admired him because he was so white-toothed and blond, like something in a catalog. If she'd had the money she would have called Land's End or J. Peterman or wherever it was that was selling Hals, and placed an order. 

She didn't have the money. She pulled her thin coat around herself and looked at the postcard vision of the Cooper boys until their car pulled away, oblivious to the fact that they were leaving Alice alone with the buzzsaws.

Almost alone. 

FP was there. FP was always there, laughing into a corner of his jacket or skulking around by the garbage cans or something. Other girls seemed to find it exciting. Alice was always vaguely dissatisfied. Something about him was too slick -- the hair, or the darting dark eyes, or the odd way he moved his mouth like he wasn't taking enough time to weigh the words coming out. Everything felt slippery and uncertain. Maybe he'd say something nice. Maybe he'd buzzsaw through that nice and ruin your day instead.

"Got something for you," he told Alice. "You know. Secret Santa."

Everybody who worked the fair had to do it. It bothered Alice that he'd just come out and told her. He was supposed to wait. That was the order of things: you waited and then everyone found out at once. And this year it would have made a nice scene for once. When Alice's sister, Ann, had passed her the Secret Santa jar, Alice had pulled out _Junior Jones_. So they were dealing with one of those reciprocal situations that would make everybody coo and heckle like they'd just known this would happen.

"Wait," she told FP.

"Why?" he said. His skinny shoulders poked up. His mouth stretched into a gap-toothed grin. 

_Wait_ wasn't such a hard command, but he still slithered around it to press something into her hands. His own were so cold, the knuckles so red, that this was what she noticed first. How she could feel the chill even through her thin gloves. Then her hands closed on the CD.

It made her furious. 

She'd had a battered old discman. But when she hadn't had enough money to get him gloves -- it was ridiculous, how chapped his hands got, how cold he always felt -- she'd sold the discman to Ann.

So. Now the only way to make this right would be if it were a Gift of the Magi thing. But he'd have to chop off his hands to make that work. Still, when everyone was gathering to exchange gifts, they'd probably coo about how Alice had done the right thing and FP had done the right thing and what mattered was the sentiment. Only sentiment never mattered. The truth was: you did something nice and what you got back was just about useless to you half the time.

"God!" she said, pressing down on the jewel case so hard she almost cracked it. It was that new CD by McCoy and the MusicMakers, that every station was playing. She'd have to beg for her old discman back. "God!"

FP stared at her. She turned on her heel, very deliberately, and started off through the slush.

"Do you even like it?" he called after her, his voice battered by all the demolition around them. "Can't tell. It's like you're all locked up in your head."

"I hate it!" she told him. "Go give it to a Ghoulie or something!"

He just slid around that. 

"Knew it!" he said. "You're such a damn control freak. You hate surprises."

-

She didn't always. It was just that most surprises were unpleasant ones. When Streaky Shore had called her _hot_ , for example. That should have been a nice thing to discover about herself. Instead it had been an odd combination of triumphant and deeply humiliating. 

_Pretty hot for an eighth grader_ , he'd said, actually.

That had been a few months ago. Streaky had been starting eleventh grade for the third time, picking his little brother up after the first day of school. Everybody at Riverdale Middle School had laughed when he'd pointed Alice out. Alice had laughed too, not sure if she'd heard right or if it was a joke on her. She couldn't be sure it wasn't. Junior Jones was laughing, and that could mean anything.

She cornered him afterwards -- Ann and his mother worked in the same motel, so they were always together after school -- and punched him on the shoulder.

"Am I hot?" she said.

"Am I a Bozo bop bag?" he muttered, rubbing his shoulder.

"You're a _bozo_. Trying to get everybody to call you _FP_. Am I hot?"

"Can't be Junior forever," he said, oblivious to the fact that despite his dark eyes and shiny hair he was still 90% knees and elbows and skinny arms and didn't deserve a better name at this juncture. She punched him again.

"Am I--"

"Obviously!" he said. "Alice. Come on. It's those."

She stared down at her breasts. To tell the truth, sometimes she liked them too. She knew she was supposed to find them awkward and intrusive, was supposed to feel like an ugly duckling. No one liked a girl who was fine with her breasts. No girl who was fine with her breasts would ever be a girl worth getting to know.

"People don't think I shove them around too much or anything, do they?" 

Junior stared at her. She had the acute sense that, for once, he was trying to avoid looking at her chest, which was rich of him, since it had started growing last year and for the past twelve months it was like he'd forgotten she had other body parts.

"That's just a rude thing to say about a girl," he said, short.

She noticed that he didn't answer the question. She lifted up her hand.

"Don't hit me again!"

"Tell people I'm really mortified, okay, Junior?"

"FP!"

"F-Punching Bag if you don't start telling people how much I hate these!" 

He breathed in once through his nose. It was like he was dressing up his whole slick, skinny being in a great big cloak of irritation. He said, slow, "You want me to just walk up to people and start talking about your breasts?"

"Like you don't anyway!"

There he had to give a brief nod.

"Call me FP, though," he said.

"I'll call you eff- _you_ \--"

"Streaky Shore says you love them. He says you can't wait for some Ghoulie to put his--"

This time she gave him a nice solid punch to the gut. He was so skinny there she was sure it would bruise. He doubled over, gasping, but then said, "I deserved that."

"Tell. People. I. Hate these."

"Call. Me. FP."

"Deal, but I get to punch you again."

He looked almost green, but opened his arms wide. She punched him again. Deal made.

Later, they sat in the motel lot and she examined the mottled colors forming on his stomach, made almost iridescent by the neon sign overhead. Alice could never decide if she liked the sign or not. It was all pomp, THE CROSSROADS set against the wild green fall of Sweetsugar forest. It looked nice enough. But inside the carpets were tacky with muck even Ann couldn't clean out, the mattresses were stained, and the end tables all cheap formica. 

"You know how my dad's missing, right?" the new FP said.

"I know he left and you're better off," Alice said, snorting.

The new FP let his shirt drop.

"I should hit you," he said. "You're lucky you're a girl."

"I think you mean I'm lucky you're a sexist," Alice pointed out. 

"It's not his fault," FP said, ignoring her. "You know the sheriff. He came around, asking about him--"

"And your dad skipped town, which leaves a nice vacant space for a new FP--"

"He didn't skip! We have a cabin out on the trails off the Hillside highway. I think he stole up there. He's waiting, probably. Once the heat's off, he'll be back." 

"You better hope the Sheriff doesn't know about your cabin," Alice noted.

"It's getting too cold," FP said dismissively. "Those trails ice right up, all the way up the mountain. That's why it's a good plan. He heads up there, holes up for the winter. Comes back in the spring when the heat's off."

There wasn't anything nice Alice could say, because if she said the truth (that FP-the-first had bailed, had found himself a new woman or a new criminal enterprise or maybe even a new son), then the new FP might slip right into descriptions of what Streaky Shore wanted to do to her breasts or something. And if she lied and agreed that FP-the-first would be back in the spring, well. She'd just be entertaining a delusion.

"When your dad gets back, are two you going to fight for the name, or are you just going to be Junior again?" she said.

FP's mother wheeled by with her cleaning cart, singing along to a battery-operated radio playing that new song by Miles McCoy and the MusicMakers. Alice tapped her feet in time to it. FP drew all his skinny limbs in close to his body.

"You like that song, huh?" was all he said, after a few minutes.

-

When the worst of the snow and sleet was done with, the rain settled in. Cold rain. Miserably wet on every road, and the trees so brown and bare that the whole town felt despondent. Downturned at the mouth. Alice's father miraculously cleaned up enough to find work around Valentine's Day, but when that rush ended the store let him go. The stores let everybody's father go, unless you were a Hermione or a Mary or a Cooper.

It would have been nice to have a discman in this weather, because then she could listen to whatever CDs she liked. But she'd given that away for a pair of gloves FP Jones managed to destroy in two months. She caught him picking a hole in one of the fingers one day. She felt her nails biting into her palms in response.

They were at the drive-in. Alice because she had a job there, in the snack booth. And FP because if FP had any cash on him, you'd find him at the drive-in, holed up in one of his cousins' cars, lips parting, eyebrows raising, all the oddity and light onscreen reflected in his glassy, adoring eyes. He was indiscriminate about the drive-in. Staggeringly boring movies pulled him in, and disgustingly bloody ones, and blasting action movies, and sneakily vicious thrillers, and even the movies that tried too hard to be funny. 

Alice marched up to him, reached through the open window of his car, and pulled off the glove. FP should have been shocked but he was too slick for that. His nervy hands grabbed back, and he nabbed her scarf.

"Hey!"

"I'm tryna watch a movie, Alice."

The drive-in was almost deserted. Only three or four people would care if she screamed right now, and when she examined them through the cold, post-rain mist she could see that they were all so sallow and dark and washed-up looking that they could very well be related to FP, which meant they might not care if she started beating him up. FP's family was like that. 

_They,_ she heard Hal Cooper warning Fred Andrews, _have never been like other people._

Now FP stuck both hands out of the window and started waving her scarf, almost absentmindedly, while several explosions happened onscreen. Alice took the opportunity to snatch it back. 

"What's that for?" FP demanded.

"It's my scarf!"

"And that's my glove!"

"And I'm gonna hit you so hard your teeth'll be in your ears if you don't take this argument with your chesty friend somewhere else," said FP's cousin, who was at the wheel. He cracked his knuckles together dangerously, snakeskin tattoo on snakeskin tattoo. 

Alice immediately pulled down on her shirt in mortification and fury. FP just said, "Hey, be a gentleman, you dirtbag. Like you could ever get a girl like her." And then he was slithering out of his cousin's reach and climbing out of the car, pulling Alice back towards the snack booth.

She regretted bringing him there almost immediately, because he went right up to the popcorn and ate it in handfuls, eyes still flicking up at the screen, ignoring her.

"Why'd you bother me?" he said. "Gloves?"

Gloves she'd lost her discman over. And she was bored, and it was grey and dreary, and she'd seen this movie nine times already, and she'd have to give any money she earned to her sister (no point giving it to her father and expecting it to get the bills paid, since he was on a tear about being fired). 

"If Hal Cooper were here I wouldn't have called you over," she told FP.

"Who?" FP said. More explosions on the big screen. He drank them in, rapt, and treated himself to a corn dog.

"Thank god you don't know or you'd use it against me."

His gaze finally slid her way.

"You're so paranoid, Alice. Jesus. Anyway, I do know. Auto shop wizard who looks like a Christmas elf."

"He does _not_."

"Sure, whatever."

His gaze slid back to the explosions.

"You broke the gloves."

"They're badly-sewn. You should've bought me nicer ones."

Alice filled up a cup with a fingers-width of coke and then upended it on his jacket. He stared at her, face white, finally oblivious to all the explosions.

"What the _hell_ is your--"

"Get out of my snack booth," she told him.

"Fine! You're a pain anyway!" he said, and backtracked to the door. She followed him to make sure he went. He was so unpredictable he might change his mind any second. He might turn and try to punish her by invading the snack booth, and then that would really start a fight. Though, to be fair, they were both bored, so a fight might not be too bad.

He stopped at the corner of the booth. Turned. She opened her mouth to snap at him and he said, "Ssshhhh," very intently.

Streaky Shore was sitting on the picnic table near the toilets, talking low to two other people. Worn, washed-up looking people. Dark. But not, she thought, people related to FP. FP was carelessly trusting with his relations, even though by and large they weren't people worth trusting. But now he put a hand on her chest and pushed her against the wall. She slapped him away on principle, but he didn't seem to notice.

"That money FP gave us is gettin' low," said one of the others.

Serpents. Or Ghoulies. No, probably Serpents.

 _You gave them money?_ Alice mouthed. _Where did you get money?_

FP shook his head, hair flying out around his face. _They still call me Junior._

Oh. Other FP.

"Well, we know where the rest is," Streaky said. "Trouble is getting it. Have to pick that mountain apart to figure out where he's hiding."

FP's hands flew to his mouth, but they hardly hid the grin cracking wide across his face.

Alice just leaned in closer to hear. This couldn't be right. FP couldn't be _right_ about his father. Life didn't line itself up like that.

 _Hey,_ FP mouthed. _Wanna come up the mountain with me?_

-

She did, even though she hadn't chosen FP. But really, one couldn't choose FP. It would be like trying to hold an oil slick. 

Still, she said yes. She'd thought that if she said yes he might try to exert himself a little and make the actual expedition easier on her, but he slinked out of that bit of good manners by having Fred Andrews pass her a note in biology class.

Saturday,  
Take the 7AM R17 bus to the last stop.  
Will meet you there.

Fred's eyebrows asked her a question. She ignored it. She didn't know the answer anyway. Saturday was chilly, though thankfully not as wet as it could be, and she enjoyed a miserable ride all the way to the last stop of the R17. It left her by the side of the Hillside Highway, next to a dilapidated little house that might have been a rest stop or a general store once. FP wasn't there, because really, why would he be. She ended up peering into the storefront's darkened windows, feeling foul all the way down to her bones, and then pounding furiously on every sad shingle of the thing.

"Geez, there's a doorbell right there," FP said, by way of greeting, and pointed out a wretched, rusted button that Alice had mistaken for a small patch of mold.

"I thought that was a small patch of mold."

"Nah. All the mold's in the basement," FP said. "Come on in."

Inside it smelled like cats, and Alice, who didn't like cats, immediately set about trying to locate and so avoid them. She couldn't see them, only smell them. There was so much junk inside -- prams and tattered wedding dresses, dirty plates and moth-eaten sofas, antique soda machines and vast fields of empty pill bottles -- that she was hard-pressed to find anything living.

"Thank you for bringing me to this fragrant animal urine hut," she told FP. "Is this your cabin? Is your father here? Can I leave?"

"You're lucky you're hot because you are still a pain," FP told her. 

Annoyingly, there was no humiliation when he told her she was hot. There should be humiliation, she knew. He wasn't all that different from Streaky Shore, give or take a few years, and so he should prompt the same feelings in her. But FP always managed to glide over the part where it might be humiliating. It was just plain fact, coming out of his mouth. 

Still, she looked carefully at the floor like he'd said something improper. It was just the principle of the thing. FP snorted.

"Oh _come on_ ," he said. "Jane Austen over here."

"If you asked me here to _ogle_ me--"

"What does that mean?" he asked flatly.

"Stare!"

"You don't mind when I stare!" he said. "Okay. You know what? Nevermind. Not getting anywhere. Come on back. I pulled some stuff out of my aunt's garage."

He had pulled a pair of battered dirt bikes. Alice examined them gingerly. Any and all safety equipment seemed to be missing, which she pointed out.

"It's not such a big ride," he said. 

"You're asking me to do it without a helmet!"

"So you can feel the wind in your hair."

"To find your gangbanger criminal father, a man whose chief specialty was trading stolen goods for money--"

"Just 'cause he maybe traded some stuff doesn't mean he definitely stole it," FP said obstinately. 

Then, "Come on. I'll wheel these down to the road. You go get the sandwiches from the kitchen."

"I'm not eating anything that comes from this house."

"Oh, but I'll bet you wouldn't want to come if it turned out I didn't pack food," FP complained. "Jesus. Can't win with you, Alice." 

He started wheeling the first bike around the corner of the house. Since he had a point about the food thing, she went back inside and picked her way through the debris until she located a kitchen that smelled distressingly like litterbox. Some of the sandwiches were tuna and some were peanut butter, and she left the tuna ones on the basis that a cat had probably already licked them.

When she was climbing over junk to get back to the hallway, a door to her right opened. Just a crack. Alice froze, then started moving faster and faster. FP came into view at the end of the hall and stared at her like he couldn't understand why she looked spooked. 

"Where are you off to?" demanded a high, creaky voice.

"I don't know, Aunt Lee," said FP.

"When are you coming back?"

"I don't know."

"Is it safe?"

"I don't know."

"I'm staying in, then," said the creaky voice. The door slammed shut. They escaped outside, away from the cat-mold house. FP took a minute to point out the hidden trail that crept up one steep side of the mountain. It curled into a wall of green and brown, firs and maples and who knew what else. Alice wasn't good at identifying trees.

"Have to walk these up the first few feet," he told Alice. "And then when we get close we have to get off, 'cause the trail goes too steep again."

She didn't relish that. It felt like a hundred miles of nothing up there, just blobby, cold, wet nature. But she liked being involved with things, doing things. The counselor at school said that really what she liked was knowing she could control the outcomes. Something to do with scoring very high on an index of life stressors. Alice had asked the counselor just what that index was about and what he intended to do with it.

"How will I know when it gets too steep?" she demanded now, as they pushed their bikes up the slope.

"I'll tell you."

"No thanks. I'd rather be able to figure it out myself."

"Jesu--"

"The Lord will not thank you for the number of times you have taken his name in vain," Alice noted.

Finally she forced him into silence. Everything around them was still and quiet as they struggled with the bikes. Alice was starting to enjoy it, the feel of being in the thick of things, on a journey to see if her reality or FP's juvenile fantasy would win out. 

Then he ruined it.

" _Do_ you mind when I stare?" he said. "I'll stop. I didn't think you minded."

"You're not really going to stop," Alice told him. As he spluttered, breath catching like he was offended, she felt the way the ground had leveled out beneath her shoes enough for the bike to get decent traction.

"I think I can figure it out," she said. "It's all this one trail?"

He'd barely said yes before she'd climbed on and started off. It occurred to her that she had no idea how much power the thing had, so she was trusting that someone as unpredictable as FP wouldn't leave her in the lurch, and that was stupid. But then she was feeling the rush of wind, the way her hair fanned back. How the bike responded to her absolute control. She was giddy and formless. Small branches stung at her and she found that she didn't care. 

She liked bikes. Really liked them. She hadn't ever thought she would. First of all, because all of Ann's boyfriends were bike men, which meant that money that could go to bills had sometimes ended up stolen and poured into bikes instead. And second of all because her dad claimed it was that bike accident, years ago, that had really washed him up and made him unfit for work, when everyone knew it hadn't been the bike accident at all.

Still, it was stupid to enjoy this so much. A constant state of thrill and alert, no thinking, no processing. Her heart was pounding in her chest when the bike finally began to complain about the slope. She slowed and climbed off of it only reluctantly.

FP came roaring up behind her soon enough. She was resting by the side of the road, admiring the clear, chilly air up here, and expected him to look to her, but he didn't. Just climbed off his own bike, leaving it by the side of the trail, and started walking, spine stiff. It took a few minutes of walking behind him to understand why.

"You can look at other things besides my breasts!"

"I do," he said. "You've got eyes too. Hair. God, _legs_. Arms. Mouth. Eyebrows. Neck. So what, does it all make you mad? Looking at any of it? I'll stop."

"What, just because I said you wouldn't?"

"Because it makes you mad."

"Oh, please, like I don't expect you to be revolting," Alice said.

FP stopped short. Alice almost walked into him. When he turned to look somewhere over her shoulder, his fine features were cloudy with anger.

"Why's that, huh?" he said. "Because I'm South Side like you? Because I'm not Hal Cooper--"

"Okay, as you like to say, Jesus," Alice noted. "Take a joke."

Maybe this was just the latest installment in his procession of unpredictability, going still and offended like this. Or maybe she had crossed a line. FP wasn't really revolting. He just wasn't a sure thing. He was like getting your fortune told: fun, false, thrilling, no payoff in the long run.

But around him, she didn't have to act like she didn't like the way she looked.

(Though, in her defense, you _always_ had to act like you didn't like the way you looked.)

"It doesn't," she told him now.

"What?"

She grabbed his cold, reddened hands and pushed them onto her chest.

"It doesn't make me mad!"

For a second, she enjoyed how his eyes went very wide and very dark, how his breath sped up. Then she stepped around him and kept climbing the trail. At the top, the trees thinned enough for her to see a low red building with a green roof, a rotting set of stairs leading to an unstable deck.

She climbed it, careful to avoid any steps that had completely rotted through. A dark green door greeted her, and a knobbly, pebbly kind of chimney that ran from floor to roof along one side wall, traced with faint chalk marks.

"Those were me," FP said, breathing hard since he'd run up the path to catch up to her. "When I was a kid."

She'd known FP as a kid and she still couldn't imagine him as a _kid_. Even as a kid, he'd felt poised to become something odd and old and untrustworthy.

"Is there a key?" she said.

"Sure," FP said. He dislodged a board and produced it. Alice fit it into the lock and pushed the door open.

Inside, everything was so still that she knew at once she was right about his father skipping town. There was no fire in the grate, no light from the cabin's tiny windows. No movement in the bright-painted little kitchen beyond the main room. When Alice drew a curtain that was off to one side, she found a perfectly vacant bathroom with an ancient tin tub that scowled at them for disturbing it. No one was here, and probably no one had been here for years, either. 

But FP pushed past her, tapping walls, dislodging more boards, finding nothing. Rooting through the kitchen like his father was hiding in the ancient fridge or something. Upending the contents of a small chest in the corner, producing packets of something shiny -- mylar, the packaging said. Pushing past this too, into a dark room beyond. Alice searched until she found some candles and lit one, then followed. It was a strangely cozy cabin if you wanted to live in the 1800s. There was a long, low table, a battered sofa, shelves piled with garbage of all kinds. Everywhere paint was slowly peeling, but at least it was cheerful paint. When she followed FP she found a small bedroom and then a series of curving stairs.

The room beyond was a long, low-ceilinged attic, with triangular little windows and flannel curtains. There was a pair of boots tossed in one corner. A bowl of rancid milk on a little table. And another bed, tucked away in the back, and on the bed --

something.

"Don't," Alice warned FP, but it was too late. He was pulling back the blanket. 

Alice thought frantically about how he must have known, how probably you _knew_. You didn't take someone's name if you thought they were ever coming back. But it didn't matter. None of those thoughts kept reality at bay. The face that stared up at the eaves was a much older, finer-boned version of FP. The only differences were the glassy pale blue eyes instead of dark, the silver of the hair, and how purple mottled the wrinkled skin. The mouth was open, the lips bloodless and white. 

There was a sound like someone gasping for air, and it took Alice a full minute to realize that of course that wasn't the dead man, but FP.


	2. Kidnappings.

FP was out of school for the rest of the year, which had to be illegal. Mary said it was because you couldn't put a time limit on grief. Sierra Watley said it was because he was being questioned by the police. Hermione said it didn't matter. He was a Jones. Obviously they didn't mind so much, if the missing student was a Jones. Joneses were not known for being academically gifted.

"What were you doing up there with him?" she asked Alice. 

Hermione's hair was so glossy that Alice could see a faint, dark reflection of the cafeteria ceiling in it. She wanted to grab Hermione's ponytail, curl her hand right around that purple scrunchie, and rip it all out of her scalp. Her fingers twitched to do this. But no scalp-ripping occurred. 

"We were just investigating those rumors about his poor father," Alice said.

She'd rehearsed this a million times in front of her mirror, so many times that she'd almost forgotten it was the truth.

Hermione rolled her eyes.

"Please don't insult our intelligence," she said. Her flock of underlings, ringed around her, broke into giggles. "He was always staring at you. And you liked it."

"I never liked it," Alice said politely. She smiled. She let her gaze wander off to the soda machine in the corner. The voice, the smile, the look -- these were always the signs, in books, that you were completely indifferent to something.

"I've known him a long time," she allowed, after a few seconds. "And I knew his situation, and I felt bad for him."

She'd rehearsed that too, and that was no less true.

But Hermione just looked satisfied. She tugged at her crisp white sleeves for a second, considering something.

"I wonder how bad you felt," she said. "I wonder if you're the kind of girl who feels so bad she..."

Her flock filled up the pause. They tossed whispers into it, more giggles, little tittering kinds of sounds. 

Penelope Pritchard said, every word snapping out with relish, "Over. The. _Corpse_."

"Pen," Hermione said, turning on a dime. "Have class. Someone died."

Alice despised Hermione. Every word Hermione uttered felt like she was handing Alice a little spoonful of hate. A soupçon, as Hermione might say it. 

But she admired the way Hermione controlled situations. Effortless. And always with the truth. Hermione wasn't Penelope: she understood that a simple, casually cruel truth was ninety times better than an inventively cruel lie.

"You know, when he thinks about you--" Hermione began now, leaning in and taking Alice's hand.

"Please don't touch me," Alice said.

More titters from the flock. Hermione's purple-glitter nails dug into Alice's skin.

"But _honey_ ," Hermione said, "I feel _bad_. When he thinks about you, he's _always_ going to remember his dead, frozen, rotting father."

-

Alice thought she was fine with death. Death happened all the time on the South Side. Old people died in the summer when their trailers got too hot, young people died when they drank and rode their bikes into other young people, pets died when they were let out and ran into the road. Ghoulies died when they fought Serpents, and Serpents died when they fought Ghoulies. Riverdale prided itself on being one of those blessed hamlets that escaped misery, but that was just the North Side of Riverdale. On the South, death happened all the time. And sure, FP's cabin was technically outside of the bounds of the South Side. But that was Jones land, and the Joneses would probably usher the South Side in wherever they went.

This death still bothered her, though. It bothered her that the man lying there had looked so much like FP. Just older and rougher and paler. And it bothered her that now FP might link her to that man. 

It was only after she'd given her statement to the police, only after she'd provided an alibi for the estimated time of death, only after Ann had glared daggers at the sheriff and Ann's boyfriend had made a scene in the station yard, that she actually learned what the first FP had been suspected of.

PRETTY BOY GANGSTER DEAD, BLOSSOM RANSOM STILL MISSING, said the Register.

The Blossom ransom. The Blossom _ransom_. 

This was more than breaking into some North Side house and hawking the valuables at a pawn shop. This was about Cerise Blossom.

The only pictures of her were wild-child sixties images in the Register. Those were all black-and-white, but the Register generally made sure you knew she had scarlet hair and alabaster skin. Physical descriptions of her were always very complimentary that way. Hal Cooper's family ran the Register, and, as evidenced by their careful Christmas trees and impressive family photos, the Coopers had a fine respect for aesthetics. 

But they balanced it, Alice thought, with a yen for truth. She sat for hours that spring in the drafty town library and dug her nails into her skin, slightly envious. It was not just frank and attractive catalog sons the Coopers had. It was this balancing act, too. Cerise Blossom, described so poetically, and in between the poetry some nice hard poison. Public records of a conviction long ago in San Francisco, for some protest the Blossoms definitely did not agree with. Court transcripts of a doctor testifying as to Cerise's mental state. Some suggestion of drugs, maybe, not that the Register told you to believe that. They were just mentioning it. In case you were curious.

In 1973 Cerise was sent away for her health. In 1980 she resurfaced once at a party, glassy-eyed and conservatively dressed, with a little nephew pawing at her knee. Still lovely, noted the Register, but a very disinterested kind of madonna.

Last year, the Blossoms reported her missing. Missing from where? _Her care home. We ask you to please respect our privacy_. Missing since when? _A month or so. Yes, we didn't report it then, but naturally we thought it would be only appropriate to hire private detectives before throwing ourselves on the public coffers._

The Register had pounced. Alice remembered it barely made a dent in the South Side, where daughters went missing all the time, but on the North Side you had to talk about it. Any time the Blossoms did anything, you had to talk about it. The only one who didn't talk was FP, she thought, and now she reconstructed his silence and considered it. It felt slippery. Had he known? When the Blossoms paid four million to the kidnappers and Cerise was secured (white haired and no longer beautiful enough to waste too many photographs on) FP had maybe said, she thought, "Well, what's the problem? She's back now, isn't she?"

The problem was that the Blossoms hated to lose. The Register dug up receipts and financial logs and suggested that some two million in public funds were now being poured into securing the Blossom money. Cerise herself was not considered a reliable witness, but still the sheriff pored over her testimony. He considered Serpents and Ghoulies and settled on Serpents, possibly just because he had a fifty-fifty chance of being right and that was enough for him. 

"Well, at least she was treated nice," FP had said. She thought FP had said. She was phenomenally bad at remembering anything FP said, because you couldn't trust half of it. And now when he'd gone off the map, gone to live with cousins or his cat urine aunt or something, she couldn't corner him and question him. So instead she took at job cleaning at the Crossroads with Ann, because FP's mother had skipped town too, so there was a spot now. She tossed her furious questions at the neon sign, under her breath.

At what point, while you were smearing expired peanut butter on two stale crusts of bread in perhaps the least romantic attempt at dinner any man has ever made, did you consider telling me about your father committing a federal crime?

Just how comfortable did you make the old lady? Did she room with Aunt Lee?

How come _I'm_ the one who gets questioned for _your_ family's misbehavior?

Just before the end of the year, Hermione announced that she and three other girls were going to perform Summer Nights at the eighth grade graduation concert. Best part: she had already recruited four boys. Fred Andrews to be Danny. Hiram Lodge to be Kenickie. Hal and Harry Cooper to fill it out -- Hal and Harry were solid and had straight teeth and would look nice as supporting players, look nice supporting just about anyone. 

This was another source of Hermione's power, how she could summon boys and face no flack for it. She just asked them for things and they gave her those things. If Alice tried that she'd be smeared for it, but from Hermione apparently any request was innocent. So, even though she wasn't blonde, Hermione would obviously be Sandy. Penelope would be Rizzo. Alice was desperate to be picked and they kept her on edge about it for a few weeks --

"I mean, it should be the four prettiest girls. And you _are_ one of the prettiest. Definitely in the top ten."

\-- but the choice, in the end, was inevitable. Like sitting suspended at the top of a ferris wheel and knowing you'd have to come back down again. Mary and Sierra were Frenchie and Marty, respectively. Alice sat fuming in the second row of the auditorium and watched Mary dance with Hal.

People thought she was too fast for Frenchie, and possibly too fast for Marty. And she couldn't be Rizzo, because Penelope was Rizzo.

She was supposed to enjoy graduating from eighth grade. People were not supposed to think she'd done things, over a _corpse_ , with FP Jones. But the truth solidified: reputation was everything. And FP, with his sordid, stupid family, had ruined hers. 

Summer brought on the kind of heat that left the whole town drowsy. Stirless heat, nothing exciting, just a brief spate bargaining for jobs for her aunts at the Crossroads, and a two-month stretch where they didn't see her father at all. At intervals she was invited to things, to the North Side pool with Mary, whose family were members, and to Fred Andrews' birthday party. The Coopers had their annual fourth of July party and so did the Lodges and so did the Blossoms. She was naturally invited to none of these. 

Mary, in a fit of pique, claimed that it was because she'd started fights at the North Side pool and at Fred's. That wasn't it. Alice hadn't started fights. She'd just slid into the picture when people weren't expecting her to be there and noticed how, for example, Fred Andrews strutted around the pool like he thought the son of a plumber had a right to peacock. And how during the birthday party Hermione had gone off with Hiram to Fred's room, decidedly without Fred.

"I'm just honing my powers of investigation," Alice explained.

"You're being mean," Mary said, plain about it.

"Just because it's column A," Alice said. "Doesn't mean it can't also be column B."

There was a neat, nice harmony in pointing out double standards. If she couldn't be pleased with herself, why should any boy be pleased with himself? If she couldn't go off with boys, why should the North Side girls?

The counselor at Riverdale Middle School had remarked, once, that Alice had a destructive character. She remembered now that FP had doubled over and laughed and laughed when she'd told him about it.

"That's you," he'd said, delighted. His crooked smile had ruined his whole face and Alice told him so.

"There it is," was all he'd said in reply, darting away from the insult. "You threw away half the things in my locker last week for no reason."

"It was a _sty_."

"That's the destructive character speaking."

"Cleaning isn't destroying."

But maybe it was. At the Crossroads, she swept, polished, stripped, mopped, and above all, threw things away. At the library, she did the same, sorting facts into neat piles and stripping away the gloss of Blossom worship that coated every rag but the Register. Tossing aside things that obviously couldn't be true. Like this idea that FP-the-first had acted alone. No, Streaky Shore had been involved too. The same Streaky that had been in lockup for a few months and now looked a little too carefully at Alice, like he knew Alice had named him to the police. He caught her one day fooling around with a motorcycle that Ann's latest boyfriend owned. He came up behind her, putting his hands on her wrists, trapping her on the bike.

"Get off," Alice said.

"Nah," said Streaky. "From what I hear about you, you like a little danger."

He was pressed into her back, the heat of his body repulsive. She told herself not to panic but not to expect rescue, either. Ann's boyfriend was inside the auto body shop. He wouldn't come out until he'd fought with at least one buddy and drunk all the liquor they had on hand in there.

Anyway, it wasn't a crisis situation. It was demeaning, it was about what you could expect of Streaky Shore, but Streaky's grip was loose enough to twist out of. And she had sharp elbows, and Streaky had a pretty vulnerable crotch.

"I've got a cabin I could take you to too, you know," Streaky said.

Alice breathed out carefully. She wasn't sure how things could get more humiliating, and then they did. Three solid boys strode out of the auto body shop. Hector. Harry. Hal. Tan, crisp, with all those blinding teeth. And here she was with Streaky Shore.

Half of her wished Hal wouldn't see. Another half hated the thought of him walking by like she was nothing.

Actually, that would be worse. Let him see. 

She decided to struggle. Not effectively. Not enough to twist out of his grip. Just enough to put on a good show, to make sure her panic was written in her stubborn chin and flailing hair.

"Let go!" she said. "Leave me alone! Let go!"

FP -- now FP would circle warily before jumping into the fray, would say _come on, elbow him, Alice!_ , but Hal was infinitely better than that. 

"Hey," he said immediately. "That's no way to treat a lady!"

It was electric. It was how Hermione Rivera must feel all the time, Alice thought. Like Alice had planted something, some pentagram composed of every Cooper family postcard she'd ever glimpsed him handing out at lunch, and drawn him in with it. She'd laid a trickster's spiderweb beneath their feet, beneath the cracked South Side asphalt.

Or maybe he just liked to rescue people. After all, Hal was firm-necked, sturdy, and probably impervious to spells. Impervious to anything whimsical, really. Hal liked facts. 

"Buzz off," Streaky said, and Hal said, seriously, "You don't like him touching you, right?" 

Just to suss out the truth here.

"I don't like anybody touching me," said Alice.

It was, she could tell, the right thing to say. Hal gave a little nod like he approved of girls who detested touches. Alice tidied those girls into one pile, away from the pile of girls who did things like go into cabins with FP Jones. The best thing about the next few moments wasn't watching the Cooper boys clumsily force Streaky away. The best thing was how she knew, just knew, that now in Hal Cooper's mind she belonged in the right pile of girls. No matter what people said to him about her, he'd think back to this. And he'd tap his chin, and say, firmly, "Nah. She doesn't like people touching her."

"Thank you," Alice told him breathlessly.

"You're welcome," said Hector Cooper, and Alice said, "I wasn't talking to you," which made Hector and Harry look offended and Hal raise his colorless brows. 

(His face was so clean. It wasn't just handsome. It also gave the impression of always being well-scrubbed. Alice considered this for a millisecond, and decided it was a benefit.)

"I guess girls who look like you figure they don't have to be polite," Hector muttered.

"Girls who look like _me_?" Alice said.

Voice high. Eyebrows up. Signs of shock. She pondered whether to bring a hand to her chest, sort of flutteringly, but discarded the idea. It was something maybe only Hermione could pull off.

"You're honestly expecting us to believe you don't know what you look like?" Hal asked now, skeptical.

Alright, so maybe he wasn't so easily won. 

Alice tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, considering. 

"I don't have to know what I look like to thank you," she said, perfectly sincerely. "All three of you. I'm sorry about before -- it's just. I noticed Hal the most."

Perfectly true. And it had the benefit of not sounding rehearsed, because she'd never expected to just come out and say it. But Hal's lips parted, flashed his shiny white teeth in a grin. Alice took them in, satisfied.

-

In the fall, about a month after school began, FP came slouching into Riverdale High.

It was just like him, smooth and sneaky, to come and disrupt things. In this case, High School, which should _not_ have been about him. Alice, who had spent months wondering what it would be like to use his face as a dart board, even had some trouble recognizing him now. It had been five or six months, and he'd changed. His face was slimmer, but his shoulders were broader. His cheekbones were sharper, and his legs were longer. 

Alice had already chosen Hal and never spared anybody else a glance, but she spared FP a glance now. He was familiar. But he was too nice to look at to be truly familiar. Her brain supplied the name and then supplied it again when she rejected it, as if to scold her for being such a hard sell.

"FP Jones," said Ms. Haggly. "Only thirty days late. Why don't you take start us off with Eliot?"

Heads turned, necks craned. Not Hal's, because Hal was so solid and sure it must have been a trial to twist and bend and goggle the way everyone else was doing. That and good sense were probably why he hardly ever bothered to waste his time with people like FP Jones. But Hermione swished gracefully in her seat. Penelope cocked a brow. Even Mary's red ponytail darted up like the crest on a curious little cockatoo. 

Alice noticed these things because she was looking at everyone else, because she was actively avoiding looking at FP Jones. After everything everybody had said, she knew it would be socially deadly to confront him in any way.

There was a curse, then some muttering. He didn't have the required book. Penelope laughed. 

"Here, take mine," said Fred Andrews. He didn't sound at all surprised that FP was here. Just oddly tired for some reason. Alice, who had never found a single thing to relate to or admire in Fred Andrews, could relate to this. FP was back. She, too, was tired already. 

"Thanks," FP said, and then cleared his throat. "Thou hast-- what?"

"Start with the title," said Ms. Haggly. "Then the epigraph."

He read the title. Stumbled on the word "fornication." Botched completely the lines that followed. "But that was in another country, and besides, the wrench--"

Giggling.

"Wench," Ms. Haggly said, severe.

"Aw, bitch," muttered FP, obviously more to himself than anybody else. 

But by lunch Hermione was spreading around that this had been directed at poor Ms. Haggly (a woman Hermione had called a hag and a nag and a witch at all twenty-nine previous high school lunch periods). That became more or less fact, no matter how Fred Andrews protested it. Only one person supported Fred. Hal Cooper. He pulled a chair up to the girls' lunch table, directed his frank green gaze at Alice specifically, and said, "You know, I think he was just swearing to swear."

Alice stared back, astonished. While she wondered if this was a test (of course it was a test. Everybody knew she'd gotten up to _something_ with FP Jones), every other girl at the table whispered and laughed and Penelope said, "I hope he gets expelled. Poor Ms. Haggly."

"I wasn't talking to you," Hal said. He said the words to Penelope, but directed his grin to Alice, like this was a joke between them. Was it? Was it, really? Alice was desperate to have a joke between them, but she didn't want to seem desperate. She didn't grin back.

"I wouldn't know why he swore," she told Hal.

Hal splayed out a big hand and used the fingers of the other hand to count off three key points.

"One, you grew up with him. Two, you claimed to be his friend--"

 _Just_ his friend, actually. How words could backfire.

"--three, you know how people like him talk. You know it's not personal. Come on, Alice. Do you stand by your friends or not?"

Again, all those perfect white teeth showed up. Like Hal had scored a hit or found the truth or figured out a way to measure her. Alice felt now like _he_ was laying some kind of spiderweb. Trapped. It should be horrible, but a part of her liked the attention. Hal Cooper wouldn't trap anybody he didn't have an interest in. 

"I lose if I stand by him, and I lose if I don't," Alice confessed. "Okay?"

"True," Hal said, with a little waggle of his head. "True. I respect your position. So let's call a spade a spade. He didn't mean to say it. But you can't say he didn't mean to, since you're between the frying pan and the fire yourself. Have been, maybe, for longer than he's been."

Then he stood up and was off, with the whole flock staring after him. And nobody bothered asking Alice what she thought about FP Jones coming back after _that_ , because Hal had laid out how inappropriate that was. How hard things were for her.

That was a better rescue, Alice thought faintly, than the whole Streaky Shore thing.

-

Around this time, Ann became very down on her luck with boys, very suspicious of them. So she naturally began accusing Alice of being improperly obsessed with them. This was the worst accusation. You were supposed to be obsessed with boys, but no one was supposed to be able to tell. You had to carry it off coolly and discreetly, like Hermione did, always talking about them but always making sure you talked with an air of perfect uncaring.

Alice did care. She cared about drawing a nice clear line around FP, some hard boundary he couldn't slick his way around; and she cared about tidying up this thing with Hal, identifying it, naming it, preserving it if it was something she actually had a shot at.

That said, she didn't _just_ care about boys. She cared about more than that. Hal and FP were interesting, but not as interesting as Cerise Blossom. 

With school, there wasn't time for Alice to work a real job. This made things rougher at home, meant there was less money for anything interesting, but it also gave Alice more freedom. She could ride her bike up the church road to the back of the Thornhill estate. Cerise had grown up there, with a pool, with tennis courts, with that grand old cemetery. Things that seemed decidedly unreal to Alice had been very attainable for Cerise. Alice would be the first to admit that she was envious, but not too envious. She'd dug up some old footage that the Register had obtained of the Blossoms. Rose Blossom, widow of Caldwell Blossom, on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Praising the medical technology of the lobotomy and what it had done for our poor Cerise, who has such awful nerves.

The Blossom family had pledged a few hundred thousand to lobotomies for the poor. And Alice figured out what had happened to take Cerise from protestor to pacifist.

She wondered if FP Jones-the-first had figured it out too. And how carefully evil you had to be, to see a fact like this and understand that it made even a Blossom easy pickings. 

"She wasn't even hurt, see?" she thought FP might have said.

Not hurt, no. But _used_. Somehow that held particular horror for Alice. She played it out in her mind: a fragile, once beautiful old lady, tucked away in a care home. And a slippery, oily Jones, coming up the road, approaching her, leading her away very kindly because he knew exactly how much money she was worth. 

Somehow the dead man became very devilish to her. She knew he was dead. But his danger grew. A masculine, especially evil danger, blooming out from the South Side. A danger that flashed in Alice's dreams, where when they drew back the blanket the dead man sat up. He was holding a bundle of blue blankets in one hand, and with the other hand he crooked a finger. He said, _I can tell you like it when I look at you._

The next FP kept trying to talk to Alice at school, clumsily, with that jagged grin of his. It took Hermione of all people to set him straight. 

"You've put her," she hissed, "between the frying pan and the fire." Then she took Alice by the arm and marched her away and was actually nice to her for the rest of the day. Alice knew she was only doing it to let boys like Hal Cooper know she agreed with them, but still. She almost appreciated it. She didn't want FP to talk to her at school.

She was surprised, however, by how perfectly fine she was when he came up behind her on the church road.

He had his hands jammed in his pockets, sullen. It was overpoweringly hot for autumn, and the church road awash in sunlight, but he was wearing an old green ski jacket like he was cold. His hair was blacker than it ought to be, his eyes the very darkest shade of brown, his skin too pale for someone who ought to have just experienced the same summer months the rest of them had.

"Where were you?" Alice shot at him.

He slid back: "Why're you looking at Thornhill?" 

Alice just said, "April. May. June. July. Aug--"

"Shit. With my mother, mostly."

Alice considered this and decided it couldn't explain the paleness.

"Were you sick?"

"Do you care?"

"It's a professional inquiry only."

He smiled.

"You're even less fun than you were when I left. Why Thornhill? You hate the Blossoms."

A decent guess. When it came to Blossoms, either you were a Blossom or you hated them. They weren't exciting new money like the Lodges or genteel townsfolk like the Coopers. They were worse. They were the people who had owned this land long before it was Riverdale, and that still acted like it was in every way theirs. 

"I don't hate them. I'm fascinated by them," Alice said. "One of them. Cerise. Know her well?"

She said it with a put-on innocence she guessed might make him upset. For once, it was nearly a hit. Certainly his face darkened, which was more than she'd ever been able to get out him before. Maybe finding his dead father had nudged him closer to regular people. This, Alice knew, was a sick thought, but it was one she couldn't help having.

"I'm not ashamed," he said, kicking a few rocks her way. "I mean that they kidnapped her. He got what he needed out of it, right? Anyway I know he was nice to her."

He leaned now on the bars of the high iron fence and peered at the ramshackle mansion, too glorious to be called a Tudor but too unforgivably ugly to be called anything else. Alice asked the next question that had bobbed to her mind.

"Where's the money?"

FP looked at her like she was crazy.

"How should I know?" 

He pushed off of the fence -- just as well, the Blossoms had dogs that would be coming around soon to growl at anybody who got too close -- and started down the church road. Alice followed.

"Your father must have stashed it somewhere, right?"

"Maybe," was all FP offered back. He was leading Alice away from Thornhill now, down the sun-lit road to the town proper. Since this was the North Side, bright, polished houses sprouted on either side of the road, the kind with expansive porches and delicate white wooden fences. FP located a stick and used it to rattle the fence posts, because of course he did.

"Your father and Streaky Shore and a few other Serpents kidnapped Cerise Blossom," Alice recited, testing it out. "They got the Blossoms to pay them four million. _Four million_. Your father gave some to Streaky and the others, but not enough, and stashed the rest, and went out to the cabin to try and wait out the worst of the sheriff's manhunt--"

"Doesn't make sense," FP said obstinately, despite the fact that he'd been the one to propose that stupid theory about his father in the cabin. His stick caught between two fence posts and he pulled it once, then shrugged and abandoned it as soon as he realized that stopping put him right in line with Alice. He was trying to walk ahead of her for some reason. Because he associated her with corpses or because of what Hermione had told him? Or was it because -- because now, six months later, what had happened between them didn't matter?

Was this some kind of factory reset? 

Alice had to wonder.

But then she wondered why she was thinking about that, when the question of the missing money was much bigger.

"Look, everyone in this town is asking the same question I am," she tried. "If you know anything, anything at all, it might just help to come out with it--"

"The sheriff already asked me. Was there a blanket?"

Alice felt thrown.

"What?"

"In the cabin. I pulled back the blanket on him. Right? Covering him up from top to bottom. His hands were at his sides."

"I--"

"What did the blanket look like?"

"I don't know!"

She didn't have the first idea. Flannel, she thought. Or maybe that had been the curtains. Maybe it had been one of those thin thermal kinds of blankets they sold down at the stores along the highway. 

FP turned now to face her. They were at the picturesque corner where the church road ran into the end of main street, populated exclusively by red shingle antique shops and a well-tended picnicking area. FP still looked completely unseasonal, out of place in the cheery sun.

"There were mylar blankets in the kitchen," he said intently. "That's what you take when you go up there. When you go camping anywhere. Mylar. Helps keep the wind out, the cold. It's what they use to _stop_ people from freezing to death. He knew that. So why wasn't one on him? I mean, who put that thin old blanket on him instead?"

-

She knew perfectly well that the last time FP Jones had tossed her a sort of half-formed mystery, it hadn't ended well for her. She _knew_ that. She'd spent all summer turning down any future mysteries he might have to offer, practicing her _no_ s and her _please go the devil and take your rotten felon father with you_ s on the flickering neon sign at the Crossroads. 

She found herself in the compact little trailer he was staying in now, down at Sunnyside. Helping him arrange newspaper clippings into some semblance of order. She wasn't sure whether she was impressed that he'd actually done some kind of research, or annoyed by how half-baked most of his conclusions were.

Most. Not all.

"Streaky's in the no pile? Streaky's the most resounding yes I can think of."

"He didn't know where the cabin was," FP said. "We heard him say so. And anyway if he had a couple million he would have used some to make bail."

Now he shifted, uneasy. Like he knew Alice had ratted Streaky out. Alice tossed her hair back. It was funny how completely fine she could be with ratting Streaky out, only to feel intense fury at the thought that FP Jones might judge her for it. FP didn't have the same code normal people did, but he had a code, and for some reason it bothered her to come down on the wrong side of it.

"Look, I don't care about Streaky Shore, alright?" Alice said testily.

"That's good," FP said, looking at his hands. "'Cause me and him started fighting after they took us both in for questioning that last time, and messed up a patrol car, and he got ninety days and I got sixty."

Alice stared at him.

" _What_?"

"Juvie," FP said. "Well, juvie for me. Just jail for him." 

For once he sounded unhappy about the normal things you were supposed to sound unhappy about.


	3. A Little Over Here, A Little Over There.

She relaxed the rule about FP not talking to her at school. Partly because there was a slithery, uncomfortable feeling she got, playing best friends with Hermione but ignoring FP. And partly because Hal Cooper had seemed to suggest that he liked a girl who stood by her friends, so FP was a bizarre kind of badge that way.

_See? An act of charity. Please invite me into your catalog. I can be the holiday insert that assures you a $39.99 purchase will be matched by a donation to the poor._

She was the poor, though. She knew that. She'd determined that on the social stepladder, she was below Fred Andrews, even. That rankled because Fred had little to recommend him. Just an artful brown pompadour he was too proud of and a ho-hum simplicity in how he looked at the world. Both traits seemed to enchant FP. It was worrying. FP should be too slippery to fix on anybody, but sometimes when Alice caught sight of him across the cafeteria she'd find him fixed on Fred. Drinking him in.

"He's a peacock now, but male-pattern baldness will get him in the end," she hissed once, when she was passing by their table and Fred was happily occupied with his hair.

"You're the most jealous person I know," FP said, sounding pleased.

"Not over _you_ ," Alice said. FP's sudden transformation into pretty-boy could not be allowed to go to his head.

"I know," he said, waving her away. "Just jealous in general is fun too."

That was a glimmer of the original FP, the inappropriately strange one that didn't seem to understand the proper way to respond to things. That FP was becoming rarer and rarer. At school, he'd been selected for junior varsity football despite missing tryouts and despite being (from what Alice could tell) a convicted juvenile offender who should not be encouraged toward violent pursuits. 

Still, now Hal hailed him as often as he hailed Alice. They had bizarre wrestling matches in the hall. Alice always looked away from those. You weren't supposed to be interested in that. Once or twice she looked away so fast that she ended up looking at Fred Andrews, and Fred would raise his eyebrows knowingly. 

Alice revised her entire opinion of Fred that year. He wasn't boring. He was insufferable.

Also, very stupid. To see him trailing after FP, a little taller and a little leaner but with much higher hair, you might think they were a unit. Buoyed along by silent masculine camaraderie or something. But the truth was, all Fred got was the Junior Varsity FP. The second new FP, quiet and private and obsessed with mylar blankets and survivalist camping, only showed up after practice, when he and Alice discussed the case.

He came to her. She wasn't wasting her time trying to get on the Vixens so she could blow kisses to him from the bleachers. She was working. Maple State Records had an opening for a cashier from three to nine, and so he knew where to find her if he needed to talk things over. They had a good setup, Alice thought. She told him what to look for. He went and looked for it. As she understood it, the town library was astonished to see a Jones come in so often. But it saved Alice trips, and anyway it was high time FP figured out how to use the copy machine and the microfiche.

"How's researching the Blossoms going to tell us who killed my dad _or_ where the money is?" he muttered one day. He was in the CD section, between the A-D aisle and the T-Z aisle. It was Fred's birthday soon. FP was considering on the one hand Aerosmith or the Alarm, and on the other Tears for Fears or Tom Petty. Alice already knew that he'd pick Tom Petty and that he'd shelve the others under the wrong letters. Her palms itched with a need to ban him preemptively from the whole establishment. 

Instead she said, "I think the money is with the Blossoms."

FP did put all the CDs in the wrong section then. Right on top of the _V_ jewel cases. Alice snatched most of them up, but he managed to grab Tom Petty first.

"Why would they still be claiming the money's missing--"

"Because they don't want people to know they killed your father to get it back." 

It was the simplest explanation. The Blossoms didn't need the law to find their kidnapper. The Blossoms were the Blossoms. So they'd gone to the cabin, collected the money, and taken their revenge. 

But FP was shaking his head.

'How'd they kill him and make it look like he froze?"

"How could _anybody_ do that?" Alice shot back. "At least if it's the Blossoms, we know they poisoned him or something, and paid off the coroner to say he froze."

"Paid off the coroner?"

"People do it all the time," Alice decided.

"He did freeze. I felt him. I think it happened after he got killed, though. Somebody was there and they put the blanket on him. Why? Why would the Blossoms do that? Anyway, he didn't have the money in the cabin."

"How do you know that?"

"I checked every hiding place that was in there," FP said. "Before and after, remember? I checked all the trick boards upstairs and downstairs."

"You don't think somebody else could have done that, too?" Alice said.

FP looked at her.

"We didn't ever have so much cash that we could be careless with it," he said slowly, "so my dad treated cash like this, okay?"

And without warning he was picking up jewel cases and sliding them into the wrong sections, all the jewel cases, all of which were Alice's _responsibility_.

"Stop that!" she said. "Like what? Like he didn't know the order of the alphabet?"

FP stopped, but only like he was under great duress.

"A little here, where you wouldn't expect it," he said, pointing at where Brenda K. Starr now sat among the Traveling Willburys. "And a little over _there_ , where you wouldn't expect it either." 

Alice blinked at him.

"I don't think the Blossoms looked in every place my dad would have put it," FP said. 

"So they missed some. So what? Or maybe they walked in while he was counting it."

FP seemed to struggle with something. 

"They didn't walk in," he said, short about it. "Because they weren't there."

"How do you know?" Alice demanded.

"Lee sold them the cabin this summer, okay? They wanted to buy it to look for the money themselves."

Alice did not follow. Alice so very did not follow that for a second she felt like she was swimming in nonsense soup. She should be doing her homework at the counter, or at least sorting jewel cases or something, and instead she was arguing with FP Jones, slick king of nonsequitors. She raised her eyes up to the dim coffered ceilings, took in the brightly-painted IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE slogans and the kitschy leaf-shaped lamps.

When she'd counted to ten and looked back at FP again, his expression was unrecognizable. Like he'd been kicked or something. A small -- very small -- part of Alice told her not to add a nice verbal uppercut. Alice ignored that small part.

"Your father," she said plainly, "was murdered by the Blossoms. They probably just told Lee they were buying the cabin to look for the money, but really they were buying it to bulldoze the evidence--"

"No," FP said, shaking his head. "No, no. It's still up. And they went over every inch of it looking for that money, but they couldn't find the four million. I heard one of them saying so."

"When?" Alice said, exasperated. "When did you hear that? When do _you_ consort with Blossoms?"

"When I went up there to spy on them," FP said slowly. "I went with Streaky, after we both got out. My mom wanted me back in school. But I grew up going to that cabin. I wanted to see what they were going to do with it."

Alice felt dunked into cold, vein-numbing fury.

"You went investigating with Streaky Shore. You patched things up with Streaky of all people--"

"He's one of the only people I know didn't kill my dad!" FP insisted. 

"Get out," Alice snapped. "I'm not helping you any more."

Before he left, though, he paid for the Tom Petty CD. Tried to pay for it. Alice's boss, Frankie Valdez, was at the register. He rested his chin on his tattooed knuckles and regarded FP thoughtfully.

"Take it," he said. "Your old man used to help me out a lot. Left his bike here for you, in the alley. I was meant to tell you that."

FP waved that off with something about his mother's feelings about bikes. Frankie absentmindedly traced the tattooed scales on his forearm and said, "No use stopping the course of nature, kid."

"He's not going to join the Serpents right now," said Alice, who was still furious. "He's going to take his CD and he's going to leave. He can join the Serpents later."

The joining, after all, would be inevitable. FP could play the wholesome all-American athlete all he wanted, but he was chummy with Streaky Shore. And he already had a rap sheet. And he was the son of one of the gang's founding members.

So now the whole horror of the spring and summer, of being considered low and fast, reared its head again. Alice decided she would not be speaking to FP anymore. This time she meant it. 

-

Meaning it was meaningless. She meant it for that afternoon. Then she meant it all evening and then all night. She even meant it in school the next day, when she avoided looking at FP so studiously that Hermione started glancing very significantly from him to Alice and then back again.

"Did you leave your good manners in your caboodle this morning?" Alice snapped.

"Let me see," Hermione said calmly. She reached into her backpack and actually pulled out the caboodle. Of course it was limited edition. The aqua and lime kind. It didn't look like the cheap plastic it was; it looked like a daiquiri had mated with a treasure chest. Hermione spent a few minutes attracting lots of attention (Hermione's specialty) by pulling out and scrutinizing every individual compartment and drawer.

"Just the better kind of makeup," she concluded easily. "Anyway, what's in yours, Alice? Bad decisions? No. No, those you keep close."

"Hiram's collar is down," Alice noted. "Is it smeared with your lipstick again? You know, it's funny, if you're going to be loose you could at least aim for his neck properl--"

"I'm being nice to you," Hermione said, sounding like she even believed it. "Not cruel. God, I wish you could spot the difference. It's just that I think even you deserve better than--"

another look at FP--

"Certain things."

And that made Alice so mad that she decided she not only was she not going to speak to FP anymore. She was also going to substitute his form with nothing. With space. She'd look at him. But her mind, she determined, would replace him with nullity. Fred Andrews' very favorite patch of nada.

Only later, when she reported to work, she started thinking about Hermione's endless makeup compartments and FP saying, "A little over here, where you wouldn't expect it." And how odd it was to leave a motorcycle parked in an alley behind the music store, all to be gifted to a fourteen-year-old whenever he remembered to come around.

She'd fiddled with Ann's boyfriends' bikes a lot this summer. So she opened the stash box on this one easily, even though the bike had been modified to make it look more complicated than it was. Then she counted out the money. Not four million, not by a long shot.

Just fifty thousand. 

-

FP said she could keep it. Alice was thrown by his generosity, then suspicious, then annoyed that he was making himself so generous.

"Of course I can keep it!" she said. "I _found_ it. I didn't even have to tell you about it."

He shrugged his agreement. It was a brisk day, much cooler than before, but he, being contrary, wasn't wearing his green ski jacket. So every time a gust of wind rattled through the alley all the faint hairs on his arms stood up, goosebumpy. Alice frowned at them. Those hairs were completely unprepared for the weather or for a ride on a motorcycle, to a degree that almost made her nervous. FP, meanwhile, kept talking. 

"Sheriff's been raiding my mom's trailer every week, practically. Like he thinks we have the money and if he hits at the right time he can catch us with it. Better for you to have it."

Well, good. She'd taken it already, after all. It was stored in her caboodle. Hers was just regular old pink plastic, but you had to admit that Hermione's tropical space station didn't have fifty thousand dollars in it, so who was really winning here?

"Anyway," FP said now. "I don't care about the money. Be nice to have some, sure. Enough to buy the cabin back. The Blossoms paid us thirty thousand, so you figure they'll want like two hundred thousand for it. Since they're Blossoms."

"I'm sorry," Alice said, not sure she'd heard right. "You want your cadaver dad cabin back?"

FP ran a hand along his sharp, smooth jaw, like even he knew how weird this was.

"He used to take me up there," he said, His voice was small but hard, somehow. "It doesn't belong to the Blossoms. You know it's older than the town? My granddad built it in the thirties. It's ours. Don't we get to have a home, or does everything sink into the Blossoms' hands eventually? We're a founding family too, you know."

Alice laughed.

" _You_? Don't you have one cousin in federal prison, and one in a loony bin--"

"That's on mom's side," FP said, irritated. "All the cousins are on mom's side. I mean me and my dad -- the Joneses. Aunt Lee, she's a Gale. So there's just two of us--"

"One," Alice put in. 

To her credit, she felt bad about that as soon as she said it. It was not a verbal uppercut. It was a knife to the ribs, sure to puncture a lung. FP shuddered a little, the kind of awful shudder you made when you were so unhappy you didn't even know you were reacting like that. 

"Who else could your dad have stashed his money with?" Alice said, instead of sorry. The sorry sat on her tongue and scalded her, but she couldn't get herself to say it somehow. Not to FP. FP was slippery adventure, not heartfelt feelings. 

"Who else did he trust?" she continued, when FP didn't answer. "This guy you're visiting today?"

"Why? Do you want the money?" FP said. He pursed his lips, like he was trying to figure her out. 

"I don't!" Alice said.

She didn't even know what to do with fifty thousand. Some for Ann, obviously, and obviously some for college, and beyond that she had no idea.

"The money's for your cadaver cabin now," she suggested.

FP just rolled his eyes. "The money's not my main question. I'm just gonna ask him if he knew about the cabin. The cabin was strictly Jones family information -- no one else was supposed to know where it was."

"And he'll tell you he had no idea even if he did know," Alice pointed out. "No one who murdered your father is going to confess to it."

"If he has some of the money, then he was close to my dad and he might have known about the cabin."

"If he has some of the money he might lie to you about it because he murdered your dad in order to steal it!"

This stumped FP. He slouched on the bike and chewed absently at one nail. It was a disgusting habit. Alice noticed that his hands were chapping already, too. 

"Look, let me come with you," she said. "Let me talk to them. None of them know me. I don't have family in the Serpents--"

Mostly because Ann was too conscientious and the rest were too drunk even for the Serpents, but these were minor details. 

"--and I have certain charms you lack--"

FP snorted.

"So you're gonna put your wannabe Doris Day reputation on the line? _You_?"

Alice frowned at him. 

"I'm not going to do anything with the Serpents," she said coolly. "I'm just going to hone my powers of investigation, help you raise the funds to buy back your murder shack, and hopefully get a little extra on the side."

Because really. It was four million. A number so large she couldn't run a mental circle around it. So large she couldn't help but be intrigued.

"Anyway," she concluded, "Possibly my slightly tarnished reputation will be an asset for once."

-

She let Ann find five hundred tucked into the couch cushions. Ann thought their father might have stolen it and briefly considered reporting it to the police. So Alice beset her with some clever arguments involving the overdue electric bill and their mostly-empty refrigerator. 

Ann was won over pretty easily. She bought Alice a purple denim jacket, too, just to do something nice, because she was back with one of her boyfriends and in a better mood these days. Alice wore it to their first Serpent shakedown, along with a velvety kind of top she'd stolen from Ann. She knew it would be effective on any Serpent mostly because of the way FP blinked at it.

"Tuck your eyes back in your head," she said. "I got you a fake license from Ann's boyfriend."

They'd be taking the motorcycle. The Serpents spread themselves out all around the outskirts of town -- it never worked if you had only one hideout; that was how one sheriff raid could take you out -- and so it would be faster to ride to each of them on FP's new bike than to try and take the buses all over. Or at least this was the reasoning Alice had proposed. Really, she didn't want anyone to see her without a bike helmet covering her face, and anyway she did like motorcycle rides. 

FP, of course, was too young to ride. 

"But if you stick to the back roads you might only be stopped by those young deputies they post out there to train them," Alice said. "And they'll be fooled by it. Probably."

FP regarded the flimsy piece of plastic with its improbable details (Beauregard X. Clarke, born 4/8/48), and just said, "I was gonna stick to the back roads anyway. If I get another mark on my rap sheet I might be kicked off the team."

"Oh, like you care about football," Alice said. FP was still playing small-town athlete. It unnerved her. It meant he was almost acceptable at school, or at least acceptable among the boys. It meant he sat with the Coopers and with Hiram Lodge. With Hiram, there were people that mattered and people that didn't, and it had always been very clear that neither FP nor Alice mattered, until suddenly FP did. He'd been promoted. Over nothing. Over _JV_.

"I do care about football," FP muttered now. "Football's fun. Don't have to think about all this when I'm playing football."

But he shoved the license in his pocket and started the bike without any further argument. Alice pulled on the helmet, making sure her hair was hidden underneath it, and climbed on behind him. For a second, she took in the reality of this: she had to wrap her hands around his waist, and put her face to his back. It was almost too intimate. She was surprised at how warm he was, so warm she could feel it through the cheap green rayon of his jacket.

Then she forgot about that. He'd pushed off into the street and then swerved at the corner, into one of the back roads, and then the wind was hitting them.

This would be her favorite part of the whole affair. Not honing her questioning skills, not seeing out-of-the-way parts of Riverdale. Definitely not flashing smiles at Serpents and figuring out the right time to drop FP-the-first into the conversation.

It was the bike. The bike and maybe FP's silent warmth, which of course had nothing to do with FP, because when someone was quiet and warm like this they could be anybody. Just about anybody. She could pretend he was Hal. Or. Well. No, because Hal wasn't a motorcycle type. But maybe that didn't matter. This was always so relaxing that for once she didn't want it to be Hal. It was fine, for once, that this was FP.

They learned a lot about the town that autumn. Or she did. FP might have known it all already, might have known about the odd single houses the Serpents seemed to prefer, lonesome things with sagging porches, far away from the main roads. The first two times they hit one of those they came up empty. The third time, they found a man complaining about a lockbox of FP-the-first's that he couldn't open. The combination was something to do with flowers and the fibonacci sequence, something FP knew instinctively because of childhood camping, which, as Alice pointed out, meant he really should be doing better than a C- in math.

Twenty thousand. Not fifty, but not too bad, either. FP asked her to store it in the caboodle.

They found another fifty with a Serpent who was living in a motel even more run-down than the Crossroads. Another thirty thousand with a Serpent who ran a dog fighting pit out by the old strip mall. One hundred with one -- a woman -- who worked at the video store of all places. FP had to get that haul. It was in a suitcase in the back, in the XXX section, where Alice frankly refused to go. FP also had to get the other hundred thousand that had been stashed at the Whyte Wyrm, a rundown kind of bar where someone had graffitied a figure that looked suspiciously like Ann and captioned it PUSSY LEPEW.

He just barely did get that haul, though. He was in there longer than he should have been, for an hour at least, and when he came out it was with a bruise already forming on his jaw. He wouldn't tell Alice what had happened in there, just that it was to be expected.

The Serpents had a curious loyalty to FP-the-first, and most gave up what they were supposed to, like they didn't want to think too hard about what might be in those suitcases and lockboxes. But not all. Sometimes they didn't get any money, just bruises or curses or fights that left Alice with her blood racing, her ears pounding. She didn't mind the fights. She minded more when they got too eager, when they slid a hand up her thigh and she didn't have the information yet and couldn't say no, or when they leaned in and for a split second she really didn't want to kiss them. 

For a split second. Then a kind of rush would come over her and she'd do it, but she'd also dig a nail into their arms so hard they pulled back, yelping. 

" _What the hell is wrong with you?_ "

She had no idea. She had some idea. If anyone at school found out about this, if Hal Cooper or Hermione found out, she'd be nothing. She'd be worthless. So why did it sometimes make her feel blank and sick and powerful all at once?

"You don't have to do that," FP would always point out after. "God, you don't have to let them--"

"I don't need you to tell me that," she'd snap.

She didn't want him to try and make her feel better. She didn't want him to try and rescue her. She'd never even wanted a rescue from _Hal_. All she'd wanted was for him to notice her. 

Alice did all her homework, and worked almost as hard as Ann did. She was pretty, and at school she was well-behaved. She never talked inappropriately about boys, and except for the whole FP thing had never done anything inappropriate, either. 

So why wasn't that enough for everybody? Why was she, as Mary always said, too mean? As Hermione said, too fast? Too attention-grabby, too destructive, too South Side?

When Alice looked at herself, she thought maybe she liked what she saw. But she had to ignore everything everyone else said. They didn't seem to agree with her. 

"How come you don't sit with us at school?" FP asked her once, while they were on an outing to a decrepit cottage owned by a former Serpent of dubious means and even more dubious character. "I mean, Holiday Hal's at our table. You love him."

Alice had been kicking at all the orange-red-brown leaves clogging up the Serpent's yard, but she stopped doing this for a second, just to spare FP a very unimpressed glance.

"I can't be seen sitting with the boys."

"Why? 'Cause people will tell you you're like Ann? Or your--"

Alice reacted without thinking. When she was furious and scared and it was a Serpent, she'd go blank and use her nails. This time she didn't go blank, because it would be impossible to go blank with FP. He filled up her mind too much, slick and inky-haired and _there_. So she just shoved him, hard. He wasn't expecting it. He went down. 

The Serpent came out then, an older guy, grey-haired, and said, "Can I help you kids?"

"Yes, actually," Alice muttered, and went pounding up the whitewashed steps to the cottage.

FP didn't come in after her. And this one didn't seem interested in Alice at all. Too old, maybe. He had an old dog he let Alice pet until she calmed down, and he offered her some crackers with cheese. Then he went and got up an old cigar box and brought it out to FP, in the yard. Alice thought there might be money in it, but it was just crackers and cheese. FP was still sitting on the bright autumn leaves as he ate them. He was tracing something on the ground.

Alice shuddered when she saw it. It was only the size of a brick, but it was smooth and gray and there were words on it. They said:

HOPE, 1950-1953.

"It was a baby," FP said unnecessarily. 

"A toddler," Alice said. Babies were a different kettle entirely. So small you couldn't believe it, and somehow still too heavy in your hands. They didn't merit dates because they hadn't lasted long enough. The smooth gray stone outside Alice's house, for example, just said ALLAN, no dates, no details, no suggestion of what had followed him.

-

By winter they had close to five hundred thousand. 

It wasn't all in the caboodle. Some of it was in Alice's old Hawaiian-print suitcase, and the rest was in shoeboxes in her closet. She purchased and installed a lock for her door, worried her aunts would come snooping and find it. They did that sometimes. When they were out of work, they would invariably be looking for money from somebody.

Ann kept finding small amounts where she hadn't thought she'd left any money. Alice kept them small partly because she was starting to feel like she was taking from FP (even though, really, it wasn't his money any more than it was hers) and because Ann was smart enough to catch on if Alice gave her too much. 

So. Fifty here. Another hundred there. The FP-Jones-I-Serpent method, for the chronically poor who couldn't be seen with too much money at once. 

It was an agony to work the fair again that year, to help Ann and her aunts set up the booth, to try and cajole her father into helping out. Because for once they didn't need to do this. They had hundreds of thousands of dollars. Having to work the fair when they had that much money just sitting around was almost enough to ruin Christmas.

Almost. Not quite.

That year, instead of passing her by, Hal Cooper stopped at her desk during first period. Alice held her breath. Under one arm, he had the annual box of Cooper Christmas cards. This year, Alice though faintly, catching sight of the picture, the theme seemed to be space. A spacey Christmas. Every ornament an exquisite planet. The Cooper boys wore silvery shirts that said NASA, only the first 'A' was a Christmas tree.

"Merry Christmas," Hal said, grinning at her, and even before he finished saying it her hands were closing eagerly on the card. She'd made the list this year. Her.

"What are you, an astronaut?" FP said, coming up behind Hal, putting an arm on his shoulder, and completely ruining the moment.

He also merited a card this year. Of course he did.

"It's my mother that planned that," Hal said, with a shrug, and then without prompting tucked a strand of Alice's hair behind Alice's ear and walked away. FP raised his eyebrows at her dramatically.

"Look at that!"

"Shut up," Alice hissed. 

She wondered if anyone else had seen it. She wondered if she wanted them to. There was no danger in attention from Hal. No one would think less of her for it. But she thought it should have been more momentous somehow. Maybe it was just that he'd done it so quickly. Or maybe she'd gone without being noticed by him for so long that just one quick moment like that wasn't going to be enough.

-

The plan had been to stop once they had enough to buy the cabin and a decent sum left over for Alice. Or at least that had been FP's plan, and Alice had gone along with it mostly because she hadn't had any concrete arguments against it yet.

Then came the Blossoms. 

FP had counted out his two hundred thousand painstakingly. Then, once he was sure it was there, he'd asked Frankie Valdez to help him make enquiries about the cabin. Since Frankie owned a store and part of an alleyway, he was the closest thing FP knew to a property lawyer, so Alice figured it made a hackneyed, FP Jones kind of sense.

Frankie asked around, as requested. He did not return with good news. He pulled out a grubby pencil one day and, on the back of a Rolling Stone magazine, sketched out the parcel the Blossoms wanted to sell. Not just the cabin and the easement trail that led up there. Also all the land around it, and the land that crept up behind Aunt Lee's house, and the land that lay all across that side of the highway.

"All that?" FP said, despairing. He was sitting on the counter, long legs tapping anxiously on a nearby display of the latest Don Henley, threatening to overturn the whole thing. "That's like a whole side of the mountain."

"Pretty much," Frankie said. "They own it all. They buy big. Then they sell big. The Blossoms have got no interest in small bills. And this is potentially maple-growing land to them. No way they would sell unless they got a couple million at least for all those acres."

"We should keep going," Alice said immediately.

There was the argument to keep doing this. To keep borrowing Ann's tops. To keep letting loose that blanker, cleverer Alice. To keep getting _rich_.

Frankie looked at her oddly, because of course he had no idea of any of this. FP just buried his hands in his hair, bereft. 

-

In the spring, they went out to visit someone FP called Meeks, who almost certainly would have some of the money. He'd been among the first Serpents. It was a generational thing, FP explained to Alice. It had started in the late fifties with a few guys, with his dad, with Valdez, with Meeks. Nothing to do with drugs or gambling, kidnapping or ransom. Just, FP said, because the South Side was falling behind. Less money there. Fewer chances. Ghoulies terrorizing everybody. So the idea was, you banded together to keep out anybody who wanted to buy up all the land -- like a Blossom or a Lodge -- and you called yourself a snake, because if you had to shed even your skin to survive you would.

"The South Side's completely behind," Alice pointed out. 

"So?"

"So they failed."

She wanted to hammer the point home. The Serpents sometimes aimed looks her way, or grabby hands. Or tongues. But FP -- FP they treated like he was destined to be one of their own. Alice couldn't tell if she was jealous or frightened of the prospect. FP was odd, untrustworthy, and slippery, yes. But she didn't like the thought of him going off to be any of those things permanently, with the Serpents. She didn't like this idea that the rest of his life was sitting there unlived, cloaked in shadow, just waiting to pounce on him. 

It was strange -- at school she thought only of Hal. And when she was questioning Serpents she made sure she thought of crazy, tragic Cerise, as a warning. 

But in the in-between times, at Maple State or on the bike, or even just walking down a long dirt drive to Meeks' house, she'd catch herself thinking of that time on the mountain when FP had listed off, feverishly, _You've got eyes. Hair. God. Legs._ He didn't seem to feel that way now that he was an athlete and Mandy Muggs and Judy Woods were trying to catch his eye. Alice never had any sense he was even looking at her. And she could always tell when boys were looking, because unless it was Hal it would give her that crawly-anxious feeling that other people might see and think less of her for it.

But still. She almost missed FP's looks. Their best conversations had always been less with words, and more with looks. Looks from him, after all, had always been sidelong, understated, like the fact that he appreciated her was just too evident and casual to make a big deal of.

He didn't look at her now. Meeks lived so far out he was barely in the town proper, and here spring had hit with a wildness it hadn't in town. Vines choked every tree, vines choked the rotted fence posts on either side of the drive, and the one-story house, when they saw it, was so clotted with them that Alice wondered how it could breathe. Meeks was waiting for them on the porch, a skinny, ashen-grey man with shaking hands who smelled like cigarette smoke. 

"It's out back," he said. "It's out back with the others. Shit, I wish he'd left me out of it. Shit. Shit. I don't even want it. I don't want anything. You hear?"

To punctuate that last question, he lifted one arm and brought it down savagely on a porch column. Twice. Three times. Alice flinched.

"He's crazy?" she whispered. She found herself drawing her purple jacket closed, trying to conceal the low-cut top she'd borrowed from Ann.

"He was in 'Nam, that's all," FP muttered back.

"When you say 'it,'" he told Meeks, "do you mean--"

"That goddamn Chevy!" Meeks snapped. "One we used to ride around in. You know, I didn't want what he gave me. I didn't want to sit here talking to the lady, either. I didn't want to go over and I didn't want what they did--"

Alice edged around his choked-up little box of a house. FP stayed behind, listening almost patiently. In the backyard, there was indeed a car, two-toned brown and white with four bulging front headlights, with white rims, with cracked blue leather seats. Alice went to work searching it. Under the seats. The glove compartment. The trunk. Slashing open the seats with the little knife she'd taken from Ann's boyfriend after their adventure at the Whyte Wyrm. Jimmying out the radio, looking in the open mouth that was left behind. 

Nothing. It took fifteen or twenty minutes to do search the car properly, and still nothing. She could still hear Meeks ranting and FP's occasional indistinct reply back. The air felt suddenly hot, like a storm was coming on. Alice climbed out and went to the front, tried to open the hood.

THIS WON'T BE SO EASY, someone had scratched, actually scratched, into the brown paint of one corner. 

It wasn't an idle threat. Even once she found the release latch the hood failed to pop open. Pressing it did nothing. Pounding it did nothing. Beyond these simple strategies, Alice didn't know what else to do. She was no car whiz.

It was now that FP came stomping around the side, squinting at the sky.

"It's gonna rain. We should go."

"We don't have it yet. Are you expecting me to travel to the most godforsaken corner of the sugar maple state, in the middle of storm season, only to come back empty-handed?"

FP dodged the question.

"My dad shouldn't even have involved him."

"Right, because he's crazy."

"Because he just wants to be left alone. A man who wants to be left alone on his own land, in his own house, Alice? That's sacred."

"So we leave whatever's in here?"

"In the hood of the car? Come on. Nothing's in there."

He pulled her away, unaware of how she was tasting her frustration, salty and hot like blood in the back of her mouth. She felt impotent, outwitted. She'd developed a taste for this easy hunt, for winning, for once. Why shouldn't she be allowed to win? 

She had felt, this whole time, like really she was pitting herself against FP-the-first, that smooth operator, that kidnapper. She didn't want to let him win this round. She carried her dissatisfaction home with her, shoving her way past a furious Ann who was waiting on the steps.

"You know, this is a pretty big night for her," she heard Ann tell FP. "I told her not to waste time with whatever tutoring you're begging off her."

Only then did Alice remember. The Spring formal last week. Hal, in his nice navy suit, coming up behind her chair. Hal inviting her out in a week's time. Which was today. _Today_.

The frustration gave way to panic. Here she'd been wasting her time with FP and the ghost of his father, and Hal would be waiting for her on the corner of Lockwood and Sugar Streets, at the Belvedere Restaurant, which required dresses for girls and jackets for boys. She flew through her preparations almost blindly -- slicking hair here and spraying it there, shoving off Ann's cheap shirt and shrugging into the same dress she'd worn to the formal, since it was her nicest one.

She knew Hal would notice, but she almost wanted him to notice. She wanted him to notice and like her anyway, the way FP did.

Ann's newest boyfriend drove her over. Hal had offered to pick her up, but Alice didn't want him coming by their house. Maybe on a day her father wasn't there. Her father had been home all week, lying on the couch, watching TV. Alice wanted Hal to notice some things, but she didn't want to have to explain to Hal about that. 

He was waiting in the Belvedere, in a grey suit jacket and tie. Only he wasn't alone. Fred Andrews was there too, in a jacket with patches on the sleeves, and so was Hermione, in a dress Alice was quite sure she'd never worn before.

"Isn't that the dress you wore to the formal, Alice?" she said immediately.

"Is that how you say hello to people, Hermione?" Alice said, just as immediately.

"I'm just not sure I like the color on you."

"I don't like a few things about you, myself," Alice said. "Like all your many faces."

Hal cleared his throat. Alice refused to be shamed. Instead she told herself that she appreciated how he did it. It reminded everyone of where they were, and it made Fred look sort of stupid, sitting there looking like he wanted to sink into his chair.

"Fred and Hermione were planning a date too," Hal said. "It just -- it seemed like we might want to share a table."

Alice couldn't see who would want that. Maybe Fred. The dinner tab at the Belvedere would be a bit much for Fred without Hal's assistance. Still, she sat gracefully in the chair Hal pulled out for her.

"I suggested we make it a double date," Hermione said then, like this was a suggestion to be proud of.

"Your ideas always astonish me," Alice told her.

"I love eating with a chum," Hermione said. 

"Oh, is Fred just a chum?" said Alice. "Makes sense. There's Hiram to think of."

" _Alice_ ," Hal said, and of course then Fred jumped in too, with all kinds of protestations that Alice barely registered on the principle that anything Fred said wasn't worth registering.

She felt cheated. First by FP's horrible father, not just beckoning to her in her nightmares but now hoarding money from her, too. And now by Hermione, who was looking daintily at the ceiling with a long-suffering expression, then back down at the boys.

"Ease off her," she said calmly. "That's just our way. You know how girls are."

It infuriated Alice that both boys accepted this easily. It also infuriated Alice that Hermione was playing the good girl to her bad girl, when, at best, she and Hermione were bad girl and worse girl. 

Still, she forced herself to smile. 

"I may be a little peevish," she said. "I just sort of wanted Hal to myself tonight. But of course it's lovely to see the both of you."

It wasn't. Hal and Fred quickly slid into discussing who they thought might make Varsity next year (FP. Everyone said FP), and Hermione made herself adorable by peppering the conversation with what the Vixens thought about it. Alice had nothing to say on the topic. She'd missed nearly every pep rally this year, because when she hadn't been working she'd been hunting through phone books and census records for any place Serpents might live.

"Some of us would like to see, you know, some new faces in the stands come the fall," Hal said, with a significant look in her direction. "Not just the Vixens."

"Oh, Alice might be able to make the Vixens if she applied herself," Hermione said carelessly. "Alice, dear, are you going to put your napkin in your lap, or do they not do that in your household?"

Fred hadn't known to put his in his lap either. He and Alice shared a surprising look of commiseration before Alice remembered that she didn't like him and he was ruining her date, and then all conversation rolled back in the direction of games and touchdowns and players with potential. Alice stared down at her rubbery-yet-expensive chicken, decidedly less delicious than a plain old milkshake from Pop's, and thought about how such a promising day could go so wrong. First the promise of more money for FP's cabin fund, for Ann, for college someday. Gone now. Then her date with Hal. Obliterated. Swirling down a drain of Bulldog-worship.

She was relieved when the check came. Hal graciously offered to cover 60%, since he'd eaten most of the food. Fred looked slightly green about the bill even with the obvious charity. Then both couples stood at the door and exchanged awkward goodbyes before Alice pulled Hal away.

Fred said, "Oh, we're walking in the same direct--" 

Alice whirled around and fixed him with a look.

"I'd like some time with just Hermione, though," he said hurriedly.

Hal slung an arm around her. On any other day, maybe it would have thrilled Alice. It was nice, certainly. It was nice to know Hermione was probably looking at it. It was nice to think of the picture she and Hal probably made. It was nice to know Hal had been won over to this degree.

"Sure I can't walk you home?" he said.

"I'll just wait for the R34 at the corner," said Alice.

"Say," Hal said. He said it very broadly and grandly, in a voice that demanded she listen to him. "Say, Alice. Are you alright? I swear, you've been in your head all night. I haven't bored you, have I?"

"No," Alice said quickly. This was solid, golden-haired Hal. She wanted repeat dates with him. She didn't want him to think she didn't want that. 

"I'm just having some trouble with a car," she added, because that was the truth.

Something in Hal's eyes gleamed. 

"A _car_?"

"What are you two talking about?" came Hermione's voice from behind them. "Alice, you're not proposing that he drive off with you somewhere, are you?"

-

Going back to Meeks' house with Hal, Hermione, and Fred was stupid, and she knew it. She didn't even want Hermione and Fred to be there. 

The lure, as always, was Hal. As soon as she thought of getting Hal to help her, it was like all the spark came rushing back to him. Suddenly he seemed frank and bold and straightforwardly useful again. 

"This is somebody trying to be clever," he whispered, when he saw the car. He shook his head and started running his fingers along the top of the grille, looking for something no one else could see.

Hermione stood off to one side. In her strappy pink heels and short poofy dress, she looked like a bon bon that had fallen into a sewer. Her expression somehow managed to convey calm disgust. Fred, meanwhile, just looked nervous. So nervous he was even mussing his pompadour.

"FP took you here?" he said.

"It's his dad's car," Alice said. "In some crazy person's backyard. Imagine."

Meeks was asleep. Or at least she hoped he was. It was close to one in the morning, so he should be.

"Anyway," she added. "It won't start. He was so upset about it."

Fred frowned down at her. Alice, who'd been considering how best to convince them all to split any money, assuming the money would be clearly visible once Hal opened the trunk, adjusted her calculations. Fred might never agree to take the money. 

"Maybe you should go keep watch," she suggested, just to get him out of the way. 

Fred's frown deepened, coaxed some supporting frown lines out of his forehead. But he turned on his heel and went around the side of the house anyway. 

"Aha!" Hal said. 

Alice stared at him. Now he was trying to force his fingers into the grille, and after a second he nodded her over and took her hands in his. She saw the problem: his fingers were too thick. He needed hers. He showed her how to feel along the grille until she caught some bolts. Then he showed Hermione how to do it.

"You want to jimmy those," he whispered, sounding satisfied. "It's an old trick, see. They put some bolts in to keep the hood trim in place. But they make sure they use bolts that are just a little too long. Then those catch on the grille, and lock the whole thing."

Together they did their best to wrestle with the bolts until finally, triumphantly, there was enough give for Hal to hit the latch and succeed in popping the hood open.

"Shit!" they heard someone shouting. "Shit! You get off here! You get away!"

Meeks. Alice grabbed Hal's arm, and a second later Fred came falling around the side of the house.

"We have to go!" he said. "He has a gun! We have to go now!"

They ran to Hal's car. Alice's heart was pounding, but she couldn't tell if it was the pounding of fright or of victory. She'd bested FP's father. So there was something in that. 

The others were gasping and panicking, Hermione clutching her ankle, Hal breathing hard, Fred's hair completely deflated. They dropped Fred off at home first and he seemed so dazed he didn't even say goodnight properly, just gave Hermione a rushed kiss on the hand and was off for his veranda.

He'd been gone for about ten minutes before Hermione said, from the backseat, "So, am I crazy, or was there a bunch of money shoved under the hood of that car?"

-

The counselor at Riverdale Middle School had said that she had a tendency to create unnecessary scenes, and that she enjoyed putting obstacles in her own path.

It was hard to stop. It was hard to stop even though she knew Hermione couldn't be trusted, even though she didn't want Hermione to know anything. It was hard to stop because of the careful way Hal looked at her. This was the best Hal, the Hal who was committed to facts and to honesty. The Hal with the very solid, serious face, trusting Alice to tell him the truth, and clever enough to catch out her lies.

"FP Jones knows about this?" Hermione said at one point.

"He had an idea that we could track the Blossom ransom money down," Alice said quickly. "That's all. And he turned out to be right."

"That money doesn't belong to you," Hal said slowly.

Alice stared at him. For a second, she was afraid of what he'd think of her. How stupid, that before this very second she hadn't been afraid of that. But then before this second, he hadn't looked this intent.

Hermione looked from Hal to Alice and back again, and put her hands over her mouth like she wanted to keep herself from saying something.

"I mean," Hal said, suddenly cracking a wry smile, "It doesn't belong to the Blossoms either, does it?"

"Doesn't it?" Alice said.

Hal cocked his head.

"They haven't come by their fortune as honestly as one might think. That money belongs to -- to the people they've stolen from, frankly..."

He trailed off. They'd pulled over to the side of the road and now he stared at the formless black woods beyond the car, considering something.

"Right, well, in that case, what does it matter if we keep it?" Alice said. 

Hermione was nodding now, behind her hands, but Hal was shaking his head.

"If we keep it, then we're no better than the Blossoms," he said. "And the people it rightfully belongs to have no way of getting it back someday, through legitimate means. No. No, Alice."

He made the same swift movement from before, the one where he tucked her hair behind her ear. Before, it made Alice feel special. Now it made her feel about two inches tall.

"Alice, we have to turn the money in. All of it. Everything you found. Understand? You have to help me do this. This town will thank you for it, Alice."

She knew she would say yes, because she didn't want to be seen as the kind of person who would say no. And it was the right thing to do. And they didn't have to bring FP into it. 

Hal put a hand comfortingly on her shoulder.

"You're doing the right thing," he said. "And we don't have to make this bigger than it is. You have to go get the money you have, and then we'll all take it down to the station."

-

FP didn't look at her for a week. 

Alice couldn't see why he was so angry. They hadn't named names this time, except for Meeks', since she could hardly help mentioning him now that Hal and Hermione knew about him. And it wasn't like FP was ever going to get enough money for that cabin. And why did he want it? It was hardly a place of good memories for him. 

Then she turned a corner one day and found him arguing with Fred Andrews.

Fred was saying, "Alice did the right thing, FP! When you couldn't. That's no reason to be mad at the girl!"

Alice backed away.

She'd wanted to be known as someone good for a long time, maybe. Wanted to recover from the blows her reputation had taken last year. Well, now she recovered with a vengeance. At lunch, she and Hermione would take turns telling the story of how they'd escaped Meeks, how they'd found all the money. It wasn't strictly accurate, but it would do.

"Do you think the mayor's going to thank you?" Mary asked them on the first day, breathlessly.

"Who knows?" Alice said coolly. "Maybe."

It was surprisingly easy to let go of the money when she thought of what the Mayor might say. What the Blossoms might say. The Sheriff had clapped Hal on the shoulder and called him a good kid and said little to the girls, but surely there was some greater thanks coming. Surely someone would want to thank the person who had _really_ found the money.

On Friday afternoon, Hermione and Hal were pulled out of last-period biology class.

On Monday, the school held a special assembly. 

A tall, red-haired young man took the podium. He looked vaguely familiar. Like Cerise, Alice realized slowly. She started to smile before she even knew she was doing it.

"My name," he said stiffly, "is Clifford Blossom. Just a few years ago I was sitting where you sit now, carefree, a high schooler. Then, almost two years ago, my wonderful Aunt Cerise was kidnapped. I lost my young innocence when that happened. Then I lost it again, a second time, when the criminals responsible tried to beggar our family. Today I stand before you because I want to thank the extraordinary young people who, two years later, made this right."

"This is it!" Mary whispered. Sierra clutched Alice's arm, excited.

"I'd like to ask Hal Cooper and Hermione Rivera to please come up here," said Clifford Blossom.

That was it. No one else. 

Alice felt her throat bobbing, felt like she needed air. She wanted to flee. She wanted to disappear. All around her, people were looking at her curiously.

Distantly, she heard Clifford say, "For their great courage in nabbing one of the kidnappers and restoring to us the fortune he took, I would like to award Hal and Hermione with the Riverdale Good Citizens Award."

Hal, to his credit, accepted the award rather coolly. Hermione was all smiles. Alice stumbled to her feet and pushed her way to the aisle, then went for the auditorium door. Her chest was rising and falling very fast, and she couldn't seem to get it to stop.

FP hadn't bothered coming to school today. Actually, he'd been in and out ever since Alice had turned in the money. Now Alice found herself running down backstreets, desperate to get to the dusty little trailer park he and his mother lived in. When she made it, she pounded furiously on his door.

"They didn't thank me," she said, when he opened it. She said it fast, before he could tell her to go away. She said it mostly because she needed to say it to somebody, and the trouble with everybody but FP was, everybody else might say something like, "Well, did you expect them to thank you? _You_ , of all people?"

She wished she could make her breathing slow down. She couldn't.

"What are you talking about?" FP said, leaning against his doorpost. He didn't sound as mad as he should sound. He only sounded tired.

"They had a ceremony," she said. "With awards and medals. And they thanked Hal and Hermione but not me. And it's not _fair_."

Now she was crying and she couldn't stop.

FP sat down in his open doorway and patted the spot on the floor next to him. Alice sat. He didn't try to touch her or anything, just let her brush against him and take some of his warmth that way.

"It's not fair," he agreed. "It's not. It never has been."

He had some bandages wrapped around his forearm. Alice slid a finger in, feeling the damp, sweaty skin underneath, and tugged them off. The double-headed snake winked at her.

Something inside her winked back, something heavy and coiled-up and hungry. Something that was tired of being denied.

"I want to join," she told FP.


	4. Boys at Night.

She was probationary, so no one said she had to get any tattoos.

That was fine. She was glad for this in the fall, when school started again. She had to teach FP to hide his tattoo with makeup. Having to hide her own every day would have been a pain. 

Especially because she was Hal Cooper's girlfriend now. And, more importantly, Hal was her boyfriend. This cleared out so many of the questions cluttering up her life -- who to sit with, what to wear, whether to go to work or to the JV game. She sat with Hal and the boys, secure, and no one accused her of sitting there to be closer to FP. She wore the crisp button-down shirts Hal gave her for her birthday, or else the flattering pale blue blouse Hermione had bought her in a dramatic and insincere act of reconciliation. She worked less, because she spent afternoons watching Hal play or going to the movies with him.

Sometimes they sat and watched Bulldog practice. Hal was frank about his envy over FP making the team.

"Sophomore on varsity," he'd say, making his gum click in a decisive way. "You know the last time that happened? 1953. It just doesn't happen that often, you know."

Alice wasn't sure it should have happened. The odd, dark FP that she knew had no business aligning himself with the Bulldogs. But FP kept slithering towards popularity, towards normalcy, in an alarmingly swift way. After his first touchdown against Baxter High, even Hermione forgave all the business with his father and the stolen Blossom money. She started telling Fred and Hiram that she thought he had the nicest eyes of any boy in the school.

"So, if you're wondering why your bosom friend Fred Andrews might resent you a little," Alice told him that night, as they walked together under the deepening shadows of Maple Street, "It's because of your bug-out owl eyes."

"Can't stand my good looks, huh," FP said, digging his cold hands into his pockets.

"That's right."

"Not Fred. You."

"What I can't stand is your egregious, unnecessary egotism--"

"Tell me something, Alice. You hate all mirrors, or just me?"

"Mirrors!" she repeated dumbly. And then she was quiet for a bit, while she tried to think of what to say next.

They were both rising stratospherically at school. They were both quietly transporting money for the Serpents on the weekend. It did seem, for once, like she and FP were in perfect alignment. Alice had that queasy summer feeling of being on top of a ferris wheel and fearing there was nowhere to go from here but down.

Both halves of her life suited her. Not just the half with Hal, but this half, too. Walking with FP under an early moon, crushing the brown leaves beneath their shoes, heavy stacks of money in their schoolbags. Because she'd liked wandering town with FP. She'd liked feeling beholden to no one. She'd liked having some money to count out for herself at the end of the day. And the Serpents gave her all of that, if only on a probationary basis.

Never mind that they drew a neat line between her and the rest of Riverdale. They were her way of saying: 

_you won't prize me? Well, maybe I won't prize you either._

Not the town's Homecoming dances, not its pep rallies. Not its new neon-and-chrome mall. Not its Hermiones or its Clifford Blossoms. She felt like all last year she'd been patiently eager to unravel the town's secrets, desperate to locate some kind of justice for Cerise, some truth out of the tangle that was FP's father's death.

This year, she was done waiting. This year, she was getting what she wanted. Everything she wanted. 

"Think I'll take Cricket to the dance next week," FP muttered.

Almost everything.

Moonlight suited FP more than it did Hal. Hal was impressive in the day: solid and large and blond. But in the night, climbing through back gardens full of asters and black-eyed-Susans, FP reigned. Tackling the bushes to give Alice room to walk through, politely serving as her accomplice in criminal trespassing.

"Cricket," Alice said. "You know, if dignity was money, she could maybe buy a soda."

"What does that mean?" FP demanded. 

"Nothing. You may as well just go with Fred, that's all," Alice said.

"Fred's not into me like that."

He said it so casually she could tell he hadn't thought about the implications, and then a half-second later he was tensing. Kicking himself. Alice felt a thrill. She'd secured, finally, this critical fact about him.

"Wait. So FP Jones, King of the Bulldogs, big man on the South Side, is--"

"Shut up, Alice," he hissed.

"Why should I? You used to act like you liked _me _, but apparently that was a lie--"__

__"I do like you!" he said, whirling around to face her. He looked a little desperate. Alice marveled at how you could take one dangerous fact and use it to force out another. Of course she'd tried to do this with the Serpents last year. But she'd never carried it off so perfectly._ _

__Then what he said sunk in._ _

__She'd known it, because of the way he used to look at her. Like anything might happen because of those looks. And then because of the way he drew her in when he didn't have to, offered her parts of himself. Hal bought her crisp, preppy clothes and nice dinners and milkshakes at Pop's. FP was just as generous, really. Only with motorcycles, murder, stacks of dirty money. So none of this should be surprising, or even thrilling. It certainly shouldn't be romantic._ _

__He had a shock of aster brushing against his pelvis. Alice found herself tracing him there, right on top of his thin t-shirt. FP took in a breath._ _

__"What are you looking at?" he said, a little defensively._ _

__"This," Alice said, and drew up the thin fabric._ _

__She'd had her first kiss already. With Hal, outside his house on Elm Street, chaste and nervous. You were supposed to be nervous. You shouldn't kiss too confidently; she knew that._ _

__She felt confident now. It was FP who was shuddering a little as she traced the place where his muscles started to make a V. Her mind was chanting, _Eyes, hair, god, legs._ Only the hair, that was what she worried over in the day, with Hal. Here it was tangled with twigs and she didn't care. And there wasn't enough moonlight for FP to notice how well she'd done her eyes today, and the legs were scratched by thorns and beset by errant bugs and black-eyed-Susans._ _

__So that left this powerful, heady feeling: _god_. At the top of the ferris wheel, safe above all of Riverdale, holding her breath. _ _

__She snuck a hand up FP's t-shirt and felt him tremble against her._ _

__"Jesus," he said, very quietly._ _

__"Touch me back," Alice ordered. "I'm touching you."_ _

__"You're rattling inside me is what you are," he muttered. "You have been for a while."_ _

__But he drew her in and then they were kissing. His jaw was rougher than Hal's. Sharper, too. And where Hal was firm and decided, FP was a taunt. Burying a touch in her hair, another on her back, straying briefly lower and then up again, like he didn't quite dare. Alice registered this all dimly. She felt clear and consumed, like when she was riding a bike. When they broke apart she dove back in again, wanting more. FP's heart pounded beneath her fingers._ _

__She wanted it to last forever, but the ferris wheel had to come back down sometime. Something buzzed along FP's bare stomach and he grimaced. Pulled away. Said, "Streaky's expecting us. Come on, before we're found by Ghoulies or something."_ _

__Normally just the thought of Streaky Shore would be enough to ruin Alice's night, but she felt too awake and calm for that now. She felt herself starting to say something, but even she wasn't sure what it was. She was reaching for him again._ _

__He turned slightly, teeth flashing in the dark._ _

__"Don't worry. I won't tell," he said. "Wouldn't be a gentleman if I told, would I?"_ _

__"So you're what -- my thirty-second side piece?" Alice said, disbelieving._ _

__It was a ridiculous, topsy-turvy notion, like staring into a world where she was the free one, where FP was the one whose behavior held vicious weight._ _

__"Alright," FP said. "If that's how you'll have me."_ _

__Maybe there was something raw and unhappy in his voice. She wasn't sure. In this world, Alice's reputation was paramount. She couldn't go around kissing FP Jones in hedges. But she had, and it seemed like nothing might happen. She'd dangle on top of the world for a little while longer yet._ _

__-_ _

__Since the Serpents offered her a cut of whatever she carried for them, she no longer needed to work as much. She still did, though, to keep Ann from becoming suspicious. But it was just one day a week now. At Pop's, now that she was old enough for Pop to hire her._ _

__Every other day she was free. It was dizzying._ _

__"I'm so bored, girls," Hermione would say. "Let's do the mall."_ _

__And for once, Alice could come along. For once, Alice could wander and peruse and _buy_ , even. And then take her buys home and do whatever she wanted with them. Break them, stuff them in the toilet, set them on fire._ _

__Not that she did any of that. But she could. 'Could' was such a nice place to be. Sometimes she was so happy with it that she'd even forget to hate Hermione, although Hermione had won the award, although Hermione was queen of the boys, although FP had told her carelessly once that Hermione was so pretty it almost hurt to look at._ _

__"Oh, because you think she's elegant? Anyone can be elegant. You just look quietly stupid and then boys fill in what they want from you."_ _

__"I never said elegant--"_ _

__"You meant it."_ _

__"Just so pretty it knocks you flat. But there's other kinds of pretty a man might like better--"_ _

__"I wish," Alice had said icily, "all you men would stop thinking we care what specific gradations of pretty you find the _prettiest_."_ _

__But she thought she understood better now. Hermione in the food court, sipping a Diet Jolt Cola, should have been washed out by the glare of neon and skylight, chrome and harsh fluorescent lighting. But she had the kind of pretty that stuck, a pretty that knocked your teeth out. Alice thought about the softer good looks of the Smith women, the way they all eventually sagged or developed stress lines or let their teeth rot, and the worst kind of hate blinked briefly inside her._ _

__"It's just ridiculous that Allie's not a Vixen," Hermione said, apropos of nothing. "Right?"_ _

__A blink of affection warred with the hate. And there was a chorus of agreement from everyone but Mary, who had turned the Vixens down in favor of helping Harry Cooper run the Blue and Gold._ _

__Mary just said, supportively, "I like that Alice works after school--"_ _

__"Oh, sure, it's so responsible," Hermione said. "But we're initiating all the freshman recruits next week and it's going to be so fun. Allie, if you were one of us you'd have a great time. I could bend the rules a little, maybe get you on as a late recruit if you'd like."_ _

__"Is this the thing where you put whipped cream in their hair?" Mary cut in, before Alice could answer. "And make them lie down in the school parking lot in bikinis in the cold?"_ _

__"I'm sure some of them will wear one-pieces," Hermione noted._ _

__"Prudes," said Penelope. She ate half a fry and then looked nauseated about it._ _

__"I think I'm really not cut out to haze people," Alice said._ _

__Penelope laughed like this was funny. Hermione said, shocked, "Hazing? I wouldn't call it hazing. They all want to do it. We all did it last year. And obviously I'm going to go easy on them."_ _

__Mary made a face. Alice suppressed the same face. They both understood instinctively that Hermione was going to be the cruelest of all._ _

__"Anyway, it's just a game to pep the boys up before _their_ final game," Hermione concluded. "Last year they made me get down on my knees and promise Hiram Lodge anything he wanted. I might bring a few girls by Hal, even though he's not on varsity. You don't mind, right? It's just -- he's such a gentleman. I think he'd be sweet to them. Hiram was just terrible."_ _

__She brought one girl: Ellie Crump. Ellie had a face like a round white dumpling. She also had a figure like a round white dumpling. Her sole sterling quality was her character, which even Hermione had never been able to find fault with. But after Ellie begged Hal to boss her around, and Hal, playing along, demanded a kiss, Hermione shoved her down onto the pavement and said, "You just kissed him, slut?"_ _

__"Yes," Ellie said. She sounded like she was going to cry. Alice remembered how Seth Muggs had asked Ellie to the drive-in last week, how happy she'd been about it. Probably Seth wouldn't like hearing that she'd kissed Hal._ _

__"In front of his girlfriend, slut?"_ _

__"It's ok--" Alice began._ _

__"No, no, no," Hermione said, ruthlessly cutting her off. "I'm the Vixen and you listen to me, slut. You just kissed him in front of his girlfriend. What are you?"_ _

__"A slut," Ellie said. Her face was purple with shame._ _

__"What is she?" Hermione asked Hal._ _

__"A slut," Hal said, rolling his eyes._ _

__"What is she?" Hermione asked Alice._ _

__Hal elbowed her in the side._ _

__Just play along, he mouthed. It's a game._ _

__"A slut," Alice said. She leaned down, hands on her knees, and regarded Ellie. Although they were in the sun-drenched parking lot of Riverdale High, safe on the North Side, this felt all too familiar. This felt like her after-school hours with the Serpents. Like being at the Whyte Wyrm, where Streaky and his horrible buddies clustered on the foul-smelling couch in the corner, laughing to themselves about this week's Pussy Lepew. But for once, Alice wasn't in any danger of being the butt of the joke. For once, Alice regarded the scene from a more advantageous position._ _

__"Why'd you kiss my boyfriend, slut?"_ _

__Hermione clapped her hands together, delighted. A fat tear appeared in the corner of Ellie's eye._ _

__"Answer me, slut!"_ _

__"Because I'm a slut!" Ellie wailed._ _

__"Don't cry," Hal advised her. "You know what you signed up for."_ _

__"That she does," Hermione agreed. She hauled up a sobbing Ellie and dragged her away._ _

__Only then did Alice notice Mary watching them._ _

__"What?" she demanded._ _

__"Nothing, Alice," Mary said frostily. She gathered her bag and school supplies and practically pushed herself away from her picnic table._ _

__" _What_?" Alice said again, before she could storm away._ _

__Mary stopped short and pivoted to face her._ _

__"That could have been you, Alice."_ _

__Hal gave a dismissive laugh._ _

__"Alice isn't a Vixen."_ _

__"Right," Mary said slowly. "But if she'd signed up to be a recruit this year, that would have been her."_ _

__Then she stomped off. Across the parking lot, Penelope was forcing Claudia Valentine to her knees in front of FP's pickup. Claudia was curvy and eye-catching, exactly the kind of girl FP Jones was rumored to like. She'd been caught kissing a boy in the Pop's bathroom in seventh grade and the rumors still hadn't died down. A couple additional Bulldogs ringed around her now, laughing, functionally no different from Streaky Shore's bunch._ _

__"Put my jacket on," FP told her lazily._ _

__Claudia pulled his Bulldog jacket on over her bikini. It covered her, all except for her long brown legs, which still excited plenty of comment. Claudia ignored it all._ _

__"Come sit by me and Fred."_ _

__Claudia pulled herself up onto the back of the pickup, between FP and Fred._ _

__"Okay, now cover your ears," FP told her._ _

__Looking apprehensive, Claudia covered her ears._ _

__"Fuck off, Penelope," Fred said._ _

__"That's right," said FP, nodding in time with the hoots of his team, all those Bulldogs he was friendly to but not quite friends with. "You can fuck right off and so can all the rest of you, to be honest."_ _

__"What are you playing at?" Penelope said, enraged._ _

__"We're not gonna be creeps," Fred said. He looked downright mutinous._ _

__"We're gentlemen," FP agreed. He leaned back and caught Alice's eye. Grinned. Alice felt something ugly shake her, similar to the blink of hatred she got around Hermione._ _

__It was easier for some people. The counselor had said that Alice felt less empathy than she should sometimes. But Alice wasn't handed things, wasn't offered people on their knees. Alice wasn't born to the more advantageous position. So it was just easier for some people._ _

__-_ _

__By late winter she was home less and less, out much more. Mostly with the Serpents. But sometimes with Hal. Ann never made a fuss if she didn't come home, because Ann assumed she was just spending the night with Hal._ _

__They slept together on Hal's birthday, January 4th. Not because it was Hal's birthday, though Hal clearly thought that was the reason. More because by then they'd been dating for four months, almost to the day. From what Alice overheard the Serpents and Bulldogs saying, a girl who didn't wait at least that long was easy, but a girl who waited longer was worse._ _

__She wanted to do it, anyway. It was no use pretending she didn't want to touch boys. She did. She liked sitting tangled up in Hal on the bleachers or at the drive-in. And she liked nights with FP, walking to out of the way places to drop off the day's profit, or waiting in even more out of the way places to pick up the next day's product._ _

__One night, in December, they'd been told to wait by the side of the strip mall near the Greendale bridge. It had been snowing, though not enough to stick, and the cold scythed through them. Alice had been in her new burgundy coat that Hal had given her. FP hand been in his Serpent leathers, bundled on top of his old green ski jacket, which seemed to be the warmest thing he owned._ _

__In the distance, a siren. Then strips of red, blue light. Police cars._ _

__FP cursed. Alice grabbed his freezing hand and tugged him around the side of the strip mall, to where the back doors and garbage bins were. Hal had shown her how to break into a car, and Frankie had shown her how to break into a room, and so _how to break into things_ was foremost in her mind, a whole untapped universe she now tumbled headlong into, testing door handles and examining locks until she found one she thought they could work with._ _

__She broke them into the video store. Inside, a Christmas tree sat in the middle of the periwinkle carpet, politely blocking the XXX section, and the decorative walls of glass tile were festooned with garlands. FP crept to the front, where they could peer out at the highway between the vertical blinds. The police lights slowed and then stopped a few feet away, and Alice watched his face tighten. They had two backpacks full of weed between them. Up until now, Alice would have said that the worst thing was the smell._ _

__Now, she wondered irrationally if the Sheriff and his deputies could smell it from where they were. She found herself grabbing both backpacks and shoving them into the XXX section. Then she joined FP, lying on his stomach on the carpet. It was warmer in here. Warmer still next to him. Alice would never understand how someone with hands so cold could feel so dangerously warm when she was too close to him._ _

__"What do we do if they don't leave?"_ _

__"Sleep here," FP said. "Hope we get out before they come in to--"_ _

__He stared at the display of upcoming releases._ _

__"...stock the new Tom Selleck movie."_ _

__"What do we do if the sheriff comes in?"_ _

__"Hope he thinks we're doing something stupid instead of criminal. He wouldn't believe anything good of me, but he might believe it of you, Alice."_ _

__Alice traced the snake on his back, its rearing head and prominent fangs._ _

__"Maybe you shouldn't have worn this."_ _

__"I said I was with the boys," FP said crossly. "If you're with the Serpents, you're with them. You wouldn't understand."_ _

__Outside, flashlights played on the glass. They ducked their heads close to the scratchy carpet._ _

__"Let's go hide," Alice suggested. "Behind the old Tom Selleck movies."_ _

__"But then we won't see if Streaky comes. You know, they might catch him, and if we can find a way to warn him--"_ _

__"Oooh. A thought. Fuck Streaky," Alice said, and snuck a hand under FP's layers to trace the skin on his hip. "Come on."_ _

__They crept back, putting several displays between themselves and the windows. Alice pulled off her coat and sat on it. FP looked off at nothing in particular and bit his nails, probably concerned about what might happen if they couldn't get the product to Streaky._ _

__"FP," Alice said sharply._ _

__She didn't care about what would happen. She was probationary, and already somewhat untrustworthy after what had happened with the first-FP's money. Requiring of a babysitter. The Serpents knew she might let them down. Though hopefully they didn't know that for the past three months, she'd been clandestinely making out with the babysitter._ _

__She patted a spot next to her on the floor. FP crouched down beside her._ _

__"I wanna do something with you," Alice said._ _

__"Now? There's cops."_ _

__"So if they find us, they'll think we broke in to have sex. As long as they don't tell anybody, I don't care."_ _

__She was pleased at how neatly that tied things up. She started tugging off his Serpent jacket, and he let her. She wasn't sure how naked she wanted him, but she knew she wanted to see more of him. FP was a slick trailer park boy. He didn't look half as nice with his layers on as he did with them off._ _

__"Do you want to--"_ _

__"I don't know about going all the way," Alice said, considering. "There's Hal."_ _

__For once, FP looked annoyed about Hal._ _

__"And you just got his Christmas card. Did you see? He's a reindeer again this year."_ _

__"I think it's a moose theme, actually. They're all moose."_ _

__"The ideal family," said FP._ _

__The Coopers really were, with their shiny vinyl floors and floral sofa covers, pastel-pink dining room and country-style kitchen. They had an above-ground pool in the yard, and a stereo system that coolly saluted you from the family room. They seemed to be involved in some kind of legal dispute over Hal's grandfather's assets, but their voices would go politely hushed when she walked in, as though they didn't want to burden her with that. So yes, for one day a year they might be found wearing false antlers, but Alice was becoming increasingly fond of them._ _

__Oddly, though, she found that she didn't want to talk about them now. FP was looking at her very intently, all the sharp, pretty lines of his face softened by shadow. It was so dark that one spot of darkness seemed to be claiming the corner of his mouth, giving him a trickster look. Alice kissed him there, just to try and brush it away. FP deepened the kiss. Like everything else about him, his kiss made her warm._ _

__She had him stripped down to his thin t-shirt when he broke off, blinking._ _

__"You want me to do what I did for Cricket?"_ _

__"For Cricket?"_ _

__"Yeah, uh." FP scratched the back of his neck. "She gave me a blowjob."_ _

__"Okay, gross."_ _

__"It was amazing, actually," he said, biting his lip again. "So I ate her out."_ _

__Alice was surprised. Ann had said that hardly any boy would offer that, but that you didn't want to be the kind of girl who would ask for it because of what they could say about you after. But here FP was, casually tossing out the suggestion._ _

__"I think I'm not bad," he told her, examining his knuckles. "Cricket said."_ _

__"Cricket."_ _

__"Claudia, too."_ _

__"Reminding me that you're gently used probably isn't the best way to convince me."_ _

__FP shrugged. That insult would land on Alice, but it wouldn't land on him. His life didn't work that way._ _

__"Kissing's fine too," he said, after a second._ _

__But he'd put the idea out there and now Alice wanted to try it._ _

__She sat back against a display of action movies and started peeling off her own layers. Shoes, socks, legwarmers, jeans. FP made a move to help her and she waved him away._ _

__"Your hands are always cold."_ _

__So then he was leaning back and rubbing his hands together, blowing on them, like that was going to warm them up. Alice laughed a little without meaning to. She wrapped his fingers up in her legwarmers, her jeans._ _

__"Warm up," she demanded. "Warm up."_ _

__So his hands were just the right temperature when he helped her pull down her underwear. Her clothes he bundled up to make a pillow for her, and then he settled between her legs._ _

__Alice said, feeling oddly fluttery and excited, "So do you just lick it, or--"_ _

__"Okay, I can do it or I can describe it to you, but I can't do both," FP muttered. He shook his head to get his hair out of his eyes, then descended._ _

__He didn't put his mouth there right away. Instead he pressed kisses to the inside of her thighs, an action Alice's brain thought was silly, but the rest of Alice responded to. It made her feel strangely cherished. Liked, even. That was such an unusual feeling that she didn't notice the way his hand crept up until he'd used a finger to part her sex. Gently. Deftly. Rubbing her until she was panting and wet._ _

__When he rubbed her clit, the reaction was electric. Alice had done this to herself, but ceding control made it feel headier, the pleasure warring with some formless panic. She tangled her hands in his hair just to show that she was still a participant here._ _

__He muttered something into her thigh, but otherwise didn't complain. Alice held on as he brought his mouth to her folds. He licked a stripe up, then another, and the sudden wet heat was oddly wonderful. Alice gasped without meaning to. With his finger rubbing her clit, his mouth making everything wet and wetter, she began to understand that this was brilliant. No matter what Ann said, this was absolutely what you wanted from a boy, and maybe you _should_ ask for it. Better to ask than to never have it. _ _

__Everywhere his tongue touched, she thrummed with nerves and sensation. She sat up a little and pushed his face further in, trying to ask for more. He didn't seem to mind. When his tongue found her clit, the need she felt was so absolute that she couldn't help crying out._ _

__FP pulled back, like an asshole. Put a finger to his lips._ _

__"Shhh. There's cops."_ _

__"I'll call them in here to arrest you if you don't get back to it," Alice whispered furiously._ _

__Her heart was pounding. Want coursed through her. It was a relief when he was back between her legs, tongue tracing along the sensitive skin. Alice did try to be quiet when she came, but she wasn't sure she succeeded. She curled around him, hands still tangled in his hair. He just hummed into her skin, still at work. He didn't pull away until she was completely sated._ _

__He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Alice found that charming but ridiculous. It was like he was someone who had just worked twelve hours' manual labor, or a prizefighter or something._ _

__"Knew you'd be bossy," FP said._ _

__"Shut up."_ _

__"You do this with Hal?"_ _

__"Not yet. Not until the four month mark."_ _

__"That's about when," FP agreed._ _

__That four month mark came and went while Hal's parents were on a ski trip, as their anniversary coincided with his birthday. Hal let her into his bedroom, the long, spacious basement room he'd inherited when Hector had gone off to college. It was all very appropriate: candles, soft music, petals on the bed. Condoms generously supplied by Hal._ _

__"Oh, good," Alice breathed out. "I couldn't be seen buying them myself."_ _

__The condoms she'd gotten from FP sat in the bottom of her purse, and when Hal wasn't looking she swapped his out for these and then wondered what was wrong with her and why she was like this. This was Hal._ _

__"I want to do something special for you first," Hal said, in a gallant way._ _

__But he was clumsy about it. His hands, which were normally fine, felt puzzlingly cold. It eventually became good because Alice couldn't ever imagine this not being good. But she squirmed a lot before they got to that point._ _

__She thought distantly that maybe she owed a thanks to Cricket and to Claudia -- clearly, boys needed practice at this sort of thing._ _

__-_ _

__Streaky never did show up, that night at the video store. And after that night, Frankie and the rest of the old guard tracked down all the younger Serpents and told them to be more careful._ _

__"It's cyclical," Frankie said. "Town's doing alright? So are we. 'Cause then they don't care what we do. But then something goes wrong. Some audit from the state, or a critical article in the Register. Then they get on our tails like this. Sheriff wants scapegoats then."_ _

__It seemed that Alice had joined the Serpents during a boom period, where the gang could operate mostly-free of legal interference. Now that boom period was drawing to a close. She decided that maybe she'd just call the whole thing quits. She had money saved up. And she wasn't tithed to them or anything. She was just a high schooler they used for errands sometimes._ _

__Gang membership, she had learned, just meant being a courier with nicer wheels and worse company. Nights at the Wyrm were particularly bad. Everyone was there and most of them regarded her with suspicion. Streaky and his ilk would make comments. Frankie, impassive, would sigh and pull her aside and ask if she wanted to practice bartending for tonight. It wouldn't keep her away from the rougher elements, but it would make her a valuable participant instead of an unreliable, potentially-treacherous girl._ _

__The Wyrm really was a mirror-universe. FP was trusted without question, permitted to mingle freely. It went against the laws of nature, but he was a king among the Serpents. Grinning on the leather couches by the jukebox, flashing his teeth her way, like he had no idea how unfair this was. As revenge Alice took to watering his drinks and cutting him only the smallest slices of pie when he came to Pop's._ _

__Your kingdom, she would think, smells like sweat and booze and hash anyway._ _

__But FP, who was usually so good at scooping up her thoughts and identifying them, would just say something like, "Jeez. Am I on a diet? You gave Hal three times that slice."_ _

__"Hal is Hal," Alice would say, and hold a hand out to where Hal waited for her at the counter, laughing and jeering with his friends. Hal would always grab it, obliging if a little distracted._ _

__"Anyway," Alice would say, "Hal's going to pay for his slice."_ _

__Not that Pop minded when FP didn't or couldn't pay. Pop was like all South Siders who had made it out. He had a small corner of his heart that devoted itself to his old people, his real people. That was why he'd always been kind to Alice, why he welcomed FP no matter what jacket FP was wearing, Bulldog or Serpent. Why, when Clifford Blossom had announced that his family was funding a new high school on the South Side, just for South Side people, Pop had quietly come out against the whole thing. Alice would see him taking small breaks, jotting notes down on a pad by the register, and then a week later it had appeared in the Chronicle:_ _

__WE'RE PART OF YOUR TOWN TOO.  
by Terry "Pop" Tate_ _

__She hadn't known, Pop hid his roots so well. If she'd known, she would have asked him for some quotes for the Blue & Gold. As it was, she wondered why he hadn't been printed in the Register, but then the next day the Register came out in favor of the new school._ _

__"Oh, come on," Hal told her. "We're overcrowded. God, Alice, it's not personal."_ _

__But it felt deeply personal, personal because it was the one time Hal refused to demand her thoughts, refused even to understand them. Hal liked facts, and in his mind a new school was a good fact, and that was that._ _

__Even though Frankie had told them to be careful, she made FP reach out to Streaky, and that night they delivered a stash to a crew out near Centerville. She needed to do that, needed to feel the rush of the bike. Of the night. Of telling the town to go fuck itself. FP seemed to get that. Afterwards, he let Alice ride his bike around for hours, down in the dusty stretch by the river. He didn't even complain about having to sit there on the ground, cold, waiting for her to finish._ _

__The next day he got a bigger slice of pie. And a burger. And Pop, ambling along behind her and tactfully ignoring the way she was giving away food, slid them a carton of fries._ _

__Alice thought FP would be happy. No one could eat like FP, who always seemed hungry enough for seven FPs. But as soon as she set the last plate in front of him, the entrance bell tinkled. A firm, authoritative voice floated in, followed by two men. One was Sheriff Whittaker. The other was a very tall man with a brown buzzcut. He was wearing a police uniform, but Alice had never seen him before._ _

__"...you start with the kids. Kids crack easy, I'm afraid."_ _

__FP stiffened. He was out of his chair before the man reached the counter, darting around the corner to the bathrooms and then going the wrong way, into the small hallway that served as Pop's office. Cursing under her breath, Alice followed him. She wasn't sure what she should be doing now that he'd decided burgers scared him, but she was pretty sure it was her job to keep FP out of the office._ _

__He was waiting by the back door, looking ready to bolt._ _

__"Good. You followed," was all he said._ _

__"Of course I followed! You're not allowed back here."_ _

__He waved this away._ _

__"You can't talk to that guy."_ _

__Alice eyeballed him._ _

__"What did you do?" she demanded. "Did you do a delivery _without_ me--"_ _

__"Keep your voice down! No!"_ _

__"Then why would you be worried about cops--"_ _

__"The new one's not a cop," FP said flatly. "Or he shouldn't be. His name's Stanger, and he used to be a guard."_ _

__"A guard?"_ _

__FP took in a breath. More than a breath. It was like all the warmth had leached out of him and he was trying desperately to get it back, to fight off the cold. He was frightened, Alice realized._ _

__"In juvie," FP said, low. "He was -- he was the worst one, Alice. He was _mean_. Just don't let him corner you. Don't let him know you're a Serpent. If you want, you can bail with me. I'll drive you home."_ _

__"I have two hours left in my shift!" Alice said._ _

__"Fine. That's a no, then," said FP, and with a strange, jittery little wave, was gone._ _

__Alice's heart was pounding when she walked back out front. Pop was collecting the men's menus, but it was Alice who Stanger addressed._ _

__"Was someone sitting here?" he asked her. "Just now?"_ _

__"No," Alice said quickly. She put a smile on. Not a big one. Nothing suspicious. Just enough of a smile, that was all._ _

__Stanger looked pointedly at the spread FP had abandoned._ _

__"That's mine," Alice said. "I'm about to go on break."_ _

__She'd come off break fifteen minutes before, actually, but Pop just nodded at her as she took off her apron and climbed onto the stool FP had vacated. This put her right next to Stanger and two seats down from the Sheriff._ _

__"Say, Alice," said the Sheriff. "Oh, sorry, Sam, this is Alice Smith. Nice kid. Hardworking."_ _

__Part of Alice thrilled at having obtained the label of nice kid. But most of her felt sick and blank. Stanger was regarding her like he didn't believe in nice kids. Stanger was regarding her like she was something that scuttled, something he'd trapped with his drinking glass._ _

__"Alice, you went to school with Streaky Shore, right?" said the Sheriff. "And you're in the Jones boy's class now?"_ _

__"The Jones boy," Stanger said evenly._ _

__"Who? Oh, Junior?" Alice said._ _

__"Goes by FP now," the Sheriff put in._ _

__Stanger raised an eyebrow. Alice thought about how FP, who had trustingly lifted back the blanket covering the dead corpse of his father, was frightened of this man._ _

__"I'll always call him Junior," Alice said, picking up a fry and chewing it for a few seconds. "If you ask me, he's not much like the first FP. I mean, he's a Bulldog."_ _

__"He's sly," Stanger put in._ _

__"No one who wears a Bulldog jacket is sly," Alice said._ _

__The Sheriff laughed. Stanger didn't._ _

__"I have a question," Stanger said._ _

__There was an odd pause, like he didn't realize that after you said that you were supposed to jump into the question._ _

__"Last year," Stanger said. "Two teenagers at your school were reported to have found his father's ransom money. Do you know who those two were?"_ _

__Alice smiled again. Not a big smile. Just enough of a smile. She felt like something icy was winding itself around her spine._ _

__"Oh, everybody knows," she said. "Hal Cooper and Hermione Rivera. But I wouldn't question them if I were you--"_ _

__"Oh?" Stanger said._ _

__"Hal's family owns the Register," Alice told him. "And Hermione's family owns Rivera's pharmacy chain. They'll lawyer up--" she snapped her fingers. "Like that. Anyway, Fred and I were there too. But we didn't _find_ it. I mean, if we'd found it, or even had the idea, they would have given us the award."_ _

__She felt a little bad throwing Fred under the bus. But she thought Fred might survive under the bus. Or at least he wouldn't betray FP, not any more than she would. For some reason, it felt important not to betray FP again._ _

__"I'll tell you my side of it, if you want," she offered now._ _

__There was an art to letting the truth slip. You had to do it slowly. Carefully. Only let loose the parts that wouldn't demolish your reputation. Alice had been doing it like that for years._ _

__FP and I are friends._ _

__Well, I work all the time, Ann. Where do you think I was?_ _

__You know, I don't remember my mother at all. I don't really remember having a mother._ _

__It was just like questioning the Serpents. Once she let enough slip, she got back that Stanger was new to Riverdale, and that he wasn't going to leave until he'd arrested the gang they knew was selling drugs on the South Side. FP Jones' old gang. Stanger knew the Joneses, he told her almost proudly._ _

__"Oh, I don't know that anyone knows the Joneses," Alice said, and shoveled fries into her mouth to keep from anxiously shredding her napkin._ _


	5. Ultimatums.

The counselor at Riverdale Middle School had said that she didn't need to act all the time. That was her trouble: when things were bad, she thought she had to act. But her acting was just reckless reacting. She wanted -- no, expected; no, created -- more tears and more yells, more sleepless nights, more impromptu decisions, more catastrophe. Catastrophe energized her. Like she was a restless, baffled little animal, or one of those monsters that toppled Tokyo for no reason.

One moment Alice would always relish, really relish, was watching Ann tear that counselor a new one. 

Ann couldn't help her out of this one, though. Alice thought some of the younger Serpents might rat, if Stanger caught them, and she couldn't think of a single reason for why they wouldn't rat on _her_. None of them liked her, after all. Only FP.

He was missing again. Not in school on Monday, and not in on Tuesday, and on Wednesday Fred Andrews was practically climbing the walls trying to catch her eye.

"Is he with you?" he demanded.

"What? No! Is he with you?"

"No, and he's not at home, either," Fred said grimly.

Alice knew that already. She'd been by FP's trailer, only it wasn't his trailer anymore. His mother had regarded her coldly. Serpents, she'd told Alice, were not welcome in her home. 

"You call this a home?" Alice had said. 

Now Fred said, "We have to find him. Usually when he goes off the grid, he tells me where he'll be. He hasn't now. So things must be bad."

The Coopers came around the corner and seized on the tail of the conversation.

"Who?" Harry demanded, thumping on a locker for emphasis. "FP Jones? I heard if he gets three more absences he's off the Bulldogs next year, which means one of _us_ could be on the team."

Hal flicked the side of Harry's head so hard that Harry yowled.

"Mind your audience," Hal said, with a nod in Alice's direction. He put his arms around her, heavy weight settling onto her back. Alice usually liked when he did that, but she was too anxious now to appreciate it fully. She wanted to talk to Fred. She wanted to find out if Fred had been questioned by Stanger yet. She couldn't do that if Hal and Harry were here.

She got her chance after school. Fred made a beeline for her, and even though Mary was with him Alice figured they could talk. Mary was prosy and judgmental, but she wasn't a gossip. Even Alice had to grudgingly admit that. 

"I hope you're lying, because I don't know where else he could be if not with you," Fred said, to begin. "And that guy--"

"--Stanger."

"Right. He tried to drag me down to the station yesterday and my dad put his foot down, thank god. Piece of work. FP warned me about him. Came to my house on Saturday, shaking. He met Stanger back when he was in this place--"

"Juvie."

"Right. I don't think he expected to ever see him again--"

"Are we talking about FP Jones breaking laws?" Mary put in. "God. We are, aren't we?"

"Why are you here?" Alice asked.

"I'm Fred's lab partner. We have to finish our question packet."

"Science," Fred sighed. He held his hands out in front of him and shook his head at those hands, like they contained all the science and all the science disappointed him.

But then he added, "I hope he hasn't skipped town," so possibly he wasn't regarding spectral science, but a spectral FP. In his hands. Now Alice frowned at those hands. 

"Zero gravity in space," Mary said, choosing to be oblivious to all of this. "That's the first question. How it is that people in space can defy gravity."

"Fred does it right here on earth with his hair gel," said Alice.

"Ha. Ha. Incredible," Fred said. "Seriously. Where does he have left to _go_?"

Some rotting, distant little house, one of the dozens the Serpents holed up in. Some video store with a massive XXX section. The Whyte Wyrm. 

Alice's turn to sigh.

The whole tour of discarded Riverdale, from its most peeling paint to its most broken boards, held no allure for her. It was fine if she was touring on FP's bike, with FP. But neither the bike nor FP were readily available -- that was the whole problem.

Alice said, "There are some people we can ask --"

"Serpents," said Fred.

Alice felt betrayed. Two things made the Serpents worthwhile: first, the money they gave her; and second, the fact that they belonged to her and FP. Not to Fred. Fred had never wandered through the gloom of the strip mall, tapping a watch and waiting for the crew to arrive. Fred had never run, laughing, across the manicured gardens of Maple Street, defying every No Trespassing sign the North Side tried to shove in their faces.

So FP had no business telling Fred about the Serpents. She hadn't told Hal. She'd thought they had an understanding: neither of them was to tell their better halves.

"He said he was getting out of that," Fred said now, shaking his head. "It's a bad, bad, bad group--"

"Bad," Mary put in unnecessarily.

"You have to agree, Alice," Fred said, voice rising. "Anyone who isn't a part of the Serpents can see it, but he's gotten tangled in it and now he can't anymore--"

"I am definitely not part of the Serpents," Alice said quickly. "But I do -- I do know one. I used to work for him. Legitimately."

Frankie, she felt certain, would not rat her out to Fred and Mary. Frankie liked her in his own way. He called the other Serpents, even FP, 'thugs,' while Alice he called clever. He taught her bartending and housebreaking. He insisted FP walk her home whenever FP played at being reluctant to do it, and once or twice when FP hadn't been able to, Frankie had done it himself, even though it meant getting a dressing-down from Ann.

Ann thought she still worked late at the record store. Probably everyone did. Alice led Fred and Mary there now. Until now she'd never invited anyone except for FP here, probably because its grimy windows and flickering sign were not anything she wanted Riverdale High to associate with her. Inside it was just as dim and odd as she remembered, the room stirring gently to dissonant garage rock, the country music records sharing an aisle with the jazz records.

Frankie was behind the counter, talking to someone sitting on the floor. Alice squinted. It seemed too easy.

"FP," Fred said, relieved.

"I thought you were hiding out in a burned-out house," Alice said. "One of the ones with no floor. Raccoons. Asbestos."

"You can get really imaginative when you have to insult a guy," FP noted.

He sounded both fond and exhausted. Fred helped him up off the floor, frowning at his Serpent jacket. Mary hovered around for a few minutes, looking like she'd rather be somewhere else, before pulling out her question packet and spreading it on a display. She started to work on it.

"Can we talk in front of her?" FP said.

"I'm not even here," said Mary. "I'm ten years older and I don't know any of you and I've gone to live in the big city."

"What?" FP said, like she was crazy. 

"It's a dream. Like Alice's mean story about the burned-out house," said Mary.

"I was being honest. That's where I assumed he was."

"Honest is what mean people say when they want to get away with being mean. Anyway, I'm answering questions about space. Please go on ahead and talk without me."

Frankie put an arm around FP and beckoned to Alice. They retreated into a back room. Fred retreated with them, despite not being invited. 

"What's going on?" he demanded. "You'd better tell me. I'm tired of being kept in the dark."

There was an edge to his voice Alice had never heard before. She was insulted by it. She was insulted by the thought that Fred Andrews could produce an edge. And not just any edge. One that made FP look caught-out.

"Listen, Fred, you're my brother--"

"So treat me like one," Fred said.

FP flinched. Alice felt a ludicrous urge to jump in and defend him somehow, but wasn't sure where to begin. His eyes were shadowed and his clothes battered, like he'd been wearing them for a few days. Couldn't Fred see that?

"Streaky -- that's a Serpent," FP began, dropping the explanation in for Fred's benefit, "he was arrested Sunday night. Not sure for what. But Stanger tackled him to the pavement in front of the Whyte -- in front of this bar on the South Side. Zip-tied his hands together. Streaky's been in lockup for a few days, as far as we can tell. See, he has the right to stay silent but no right to ask that they let him out. That's how cops work, you know--"

Here he looked at Alice and Fred, like he felt he needed to explain this to them.

"I _know_ that's how cops work," Alice said, not wanting to be lumped in with Fred.

Fred looked at her strangely.

A misstep. She reassured herself that if Fred tried to spread rumors about her, no one would believe him anyway.

"Do you know what Stanger wants?" Alice said.

"Me," FP said. His hands were trembling.

Frankie said, voice very even, "Now, don't get a big head--"

"I think you're just step one," Alice cut in. "Not his bigger goal. I think he knows a gang has been dealing on the South Side, and he wants to be the person who stops it." 

Stanger had told her as much. But it wasn't worth getting into that in front of Fred. Fred was starting to look enraged, a flush creeping up from his cheekbones to the place where his forehead met his pompadour. 

"Jesus. Are you _dealing_?" he said.

"Courier," FP protested. "Come on. Cut me a break. I have to make rent on my own place now--"

"You have to make rent because your mom threw you out because she thinks you're dealing--"

"Fighting isn't going to fix our problem," Alice told the boys, though she was reluctant to break up the fight. She'd suspected for a long time that Fred and FP weren't the unit they pretended to be, and now she was seeing as much, and it pleased her.

"What we need is a way to get Stanger off our backs," Frankie said. "He's mean, alright, but he's a showboater too. Could tell that right away when he tackled Streaky. Maybe we can use that."

"Count me out," FP said shakily.

"I should hope you're out. For once," Fred put in.

"Stanger wants a gang," Alice said, mostly to talk over Fred. "He wants to clean up shop. He's aiming for the Serpents, but he doesn't need to have the Serpents. Maybe he'd go away if we offered him another gang."

FP and Frankie looked at her, comprehension dawning. 

"Oh no," said Fred. "No, no, no. You can't pin the Serpents' dealing on other people--"

"The Ghoulies deal too," Frankie put in.

The Ghoulies dealt more, probably. And worse, probably. Alice had no way of being sure, because even she wouldn't mix with the Ghoulies. 

"They've been pressuring us to cut them in to our neighborhoods," Frankie said. "They've been wanting that for a while."

"Maybe we -- you -- maybe you give in," Alice suggested. "And then maybe some rare trustworthy South Sider calls in a tip."

"This is wrong," Fred protested.

Frankie looked at him dangerously. FP slid in between the two of them, putting himself squarely in front of Fred.

"All you've gotta do, Freddy, is look the other way," he said.

Fred gave him a long, bitter look.

"Yeah, well, I have one condition, then," he said. "No. Two. First, you come back to school, instead of hiding like a damn coward--"

FP flinched again. Fred was unaffected by this. Alice found that repulsively cruel for some reason.

"--and second," Fred continued. "You're out of this. _Out_."

FP didn't hesitate in shrugging off his jacket and handing it to Frankie. 

Her hate solidified. Later, after the boys had gone off to talk, to be a _unit_ , she walked the other way with Mary and found that her face was wet. Not with sadness. With something harder and uglier. You could cry with envy, too. She'd thought she was done with that, though. She'd thought that once she had Hal and freedom, once she was one of the girls who didn't care about Riverdale and so whose reputation could not be so easily besmirched by the town, that she'd never have to cry with envy again.

But here she was. Like she was ten years old, watching Mary and Hermione enjoy the holiday fair.

"Alice," Mary cut in.

"Leave me alone."

Usually when she cried in front of Mary, Mary knew to leave her alone. That was the one advantage of Mary. She was the only girl Alice could cry in front of.

"It's not any of my business," Mary said. "And I won't tell anyone. But I think I know something."

"Good. Keep it to yourself," Alice retorted.

"I will," said Mary, with no attempt to make the simple words secretly menacing, or to stuff them full of double-meaning, or anything like that. So Alice, who hardly ever believed anybody, believed her.

"But Alice," Mary said, after a few minutes. "If I can tell you're probably a Serpent, then, you know, at some point Hal will too."

-

The answer was to ditch the Serpents, to shrug them off as easily as FP had shrugged off his jacket. Because now Mary knew. Hal maybe knew. Fred might have been able to tell, if only he hadn't been so wrapped up in cutting short every slippery side of FP's.

But she wasn't sure she didn't want Hal to know. Hal liked catching her untruths. And she liked it when Hal caught her at them. That was the genius of Hal: he could spot the lie. Alice had been monstrously isolated for so long, with no one to know she was lying about anything but FP. So a part of her wanted Hal in on her secrets too. She wanted Hal to think she was pretty, to think she was modest, to think she was sweet and good. But she also wanted Hal to know she was none of that, and to like her anyway.

When Frankie suggested that she ride with them to meet with the Ghoulies and FP refused to let her have his bike, she had Hal break the lock and help her hotwire it.

She didn't feel bad about it. FP had it tied up in front of Fred's house. FP had spent a week holed up with Fred. Stanger kept knocking, and Fred's parents kept holding him at bay, and so the unit reemerged. FredandFP. FPandFred.

"I thought he was your friend," Hal muttered, kneeling in the dirt and wrestling with the bike lock. It was night and his hair caught all the moonlight. Alice passed a hand through it. Maybe she could grow to like Hal in the dark as much as she liked him in the day.

"He is my friend, but I'm not his best friend."

Hal turned to look at her.

"I'm sorry, Alice, am I communing with the Andrews garden slugs because you're, what, jealous?"

That was exactly it and there was no use hiding things from Hal, because Hal couldn't catch her thoughts but he could catch her lies. 

"You're communing with the Andrews garden slugs because you like me and you want to impress me," Alice said. 

This was also true.

"Anyway," Alice said. "I'm doing something nice for FP. I'm helping keep him out of the Serpents."

Hal stopped working and pulled off his sweatshirt. It was a hot night, one of those spring nights that seemed all too eager to give up in the face of an encroaching summer. Hal was sweating. Alice took a tissue out of her backpack and rubbed the sweat off the back of his broad neck.

"Thank you," Hal muttered. "Are you with the Serpents, Alice?"

"Not permanently or anything," Alice said. "Just for now. Just while I need money."

Hal looked up at her. Alice tried to find the traces of his eyebrows, and discovered that with nothing but moonlight she couldn't find them at all -- they were too pale. 

"He got you into it?" Hal said, jerking his chin at Fred's house.

"No. I got myself."

"Well, at least you're admitting it," Hal said. "At least you're telling me. Tell me something else: does he respect that you're with me? Because I thought he was my friend."

His tone was businesslike. Hal never made a scene. Coopers weren't scene-making people. Alice had been to dinner at their house that week and heard they'd lost their court case over the grandfather's assets, and even that hadn't prompted a scene from them. 

"It's very sad," Hal's mother had said. "Pass the peas. Should I have made peas? I always make peas."

Now Alice said, striving to match that Cooper calm, "FP knows perfectly well that I'm your girl."

"He'd better," Hal said, shaking his head. "I mean. I don't ask much of people, Alice. But I ask that they be decent."

He didn't go with Alice to the meet, just told her firmly that he expected her to be sensible at it. He did go with Alice to tip Stanger off, a few days later. He shook Stanger's hand firmly, completely at ease, and introduced himself as the boy who'd tracked down FP Jones' fortune. Stanger looked disbelieving, but Hal wasn't thrown off. Stanger frightened boys like FP, but he posed no threat to the Hals.

"If you ask me, it's a different bunch at it now," Hal said. "None of these snake tattoos. More a Night of the Living Dead thing. I'm from a reporting family, Mr. Stanger. We notice the details."

"They were hanging out by the strip mall," Alice said. "They're called the Ghoulies."

"Ghoulies?" Stanger said, wrinkling his nose.

"A much older gang than the Serpents," Alice murmured. "More connected. Worse."

Stanger looked intrigued.

Afterwards, Alice wanted to go to the Whyte Wyrm to talk to Frankie, or else to Pop's, which was always comforting after a hairy experience. But Hal was at the wheel and wouldn't take her to either place.

"Where are going, then?"

"God, would you just trust me?" Hal demanded. "Haven't I done enough to earn your trust, Alice? Haven't I done enough?"

Alice subsided. She didn't like not knowing where she was being driven, that was all. If FP tried that, she always poked at his shoulder until he turned his chin enough to toss the answer back her way.

Hal took her to a place so like Pop's that Alice couldn't understand why they hadn't just gone there. It was more sanitized, everything an anesthetized green chrome instead of red and blue and warm brown. Alice thought it might be some kind of chain diner.

"Well, this certainly feels like a betrayal," she said primly, when the waitress handed her a menu. It was very like the Pop's menu. The food wasn't as good, probably.

Hal just leaned forward on his elbows, regarding her. Assessing her. Usually there was some admiration in his assessment, but not today.

"What?" Alice said, alarmed.

"I know you don't like people to--" he waved at the green chrome walls, "--judge you. Or think less of you. I mean, we have to consider what people _think_. So, since we're going to be having a more difficult conversation, I thought it would only be nice to take us a little out of Riverdale for it. Do you trust me now?"

"Of course," Alice said reflexively.

A difficult conversation? What did he mean -- a difficult conversation?

"Do you like me, Alice?" Hal said, leaning forward again. He was smiling. Hal's smiles were longer-lasting than FP's, but more joyless somehow. Just a stretch of lips. Hadn't she liked them once? She wasn't sure she liked them right now.

"Of course I like you," Alice said.

Hal said, "Well, I mean, I go with you to crazy people's houses, and save a spot for you next to me in every period. And I give you gifts, and I make sure my parents like you. I don't get mad when you say you're in the Serpents, and I help you help a gang--"

"I get it. You're delightful," Alice said, voice flat.

None of that was wrong. She did like Hal for those reasons. Normally she liked Hal, period. There wasn't much to complain about with Hal, unless you counted how he hadn't gotten any better at cunnilingus. But there she was always comparing him to FP, anyway.

Hal held up a finger now.

"Hold on," he said. "I didn't say I was delightful. I know I have flaws, like any other man. But then you -- you're so beautiful, with that hair and those eyes and those legs--"

And _god_ Alice thought nervously, but Hal didn't add _god_ to his list of the things he liked about her.

"--but you have flaws too. Like any other woman. And I think I've been patient with you, so I need you to be patient about one thing with me. Just one thing, Alice."

He was still holding up his finger. Just the one thing. He was more generous than Fred: not two things. One thing. But Alice knew what the thing would be even before he said it.

"I need you to cut this -- this whatever the fuck it is -- that you have going on with FP Jones."

The waitress came back.

"Do you know what you want?" she said.

Alice didn't. Alice really didn't.

"Hamburger and fries, please," Hal said, with a broad smile.

-

He probably thought that if she ditched FP, she would ditch the Serpents too, in time.

It didn't work that way. FP was out of the gang. Out. He was in Fred Andrews' pocket that way, attentive to Fred as ever. Alice saw it as a betrayal and hated him a little for it. 

But now that he was gone, the Serpents opened up a space for her. Not just because he was gone. Because everyone knew Alice had been the one to think up the plan with the Ghoulies. Alice had been the one to tip off Stanger. Alice was the reason their oldest, bitterest enemies had all been arrested, and Streaky let out.

Streaky showed up at her house with a bike. Grudging. He freely admitted that the rest of the gang had made him deliver it. Demoted to courier.

"That sounds right," Alice said. She straddled the bike, delighted. She couldn't believe FP was trading this away, all for a chance to nip pathetically at Fred's heels.

Ann watched her from the porch. When Streaky was gone, she followed Alice to her room. She stood there white-faced, twisting her hands anxiously.

"How long?" Ann demanded. "If Hal finds out--"

"Hal knows and he doesn't care," Alice retorted. "He loves me."

"They never love you," Ann snapped. "I thought you were smarter than this."

"You thought I was frightened," Alice said. She felt a sudden overpowering scorn for Ann. She knew it was unfair. She knew everything had been unfair for Ann. But sometimes Alice was tired of looking at her, at the way she stressed and worried. Ann was much prettier than Alice was, or could have been. Alice looked like a Smith, more or less, but Ann looked like their mother: tall and willowy, with long white-blonde hair. But Ann was a house on the edge of town, sagging before her time.

"People will talk--"

"People already talk about us," Alice hissed. "About you and about mo--"

Ann slapped her. Hard. Alice found herself crying again, and these tears were much fatter and uglier than they'd even been the time she'd cried with Mary. Ann was yelling at her now, but Alice just stayed quiet and cried like this. Silence was better sometimes anyway. Ann was like her, so she liked a fight. Expected a fight. Being silent back -- that was the ticket. That was the way to come out of this the more powerful one.

Her father said she could keep the bike, anyway, since he didn't care much whether she was with the Serpents or what happened to her. And that was that. But Ann didn't look at her for the rest of spring, all of summer, and well into the fall. 

FP didn't look at her much, either. 

They still sat at the same table: the best table. Alice-and-Hal, Hermione-and-Hiram, plus the boys. They still had all their classes together. Alice had never told FP to stay away. Alice had never told him anything at all. Somehow, with FP, she didn't need to have a conversation. He just needed to look up, once, and see the way she was carefully leaning into Hal's arm. How she was making no effort to lift up her backpack and make room for FP beside her.

And so FP understood. 

Still, a little after junior year began, she thought she should try to put the shift into words. She was walking to the Wyrm, where her bike was stashed. She came to the hideous, graffitied span of the South Side bridge. It was a September that straggled, that pretended it was still August, so the air was dry and hot and above her the sun was sinking in the reddest way it knew how, a red that tinted the Sweetwater. 

FP was walking towards her. Alice stopped.

"Hal said--"

"I know," he said, shrugging. "I figured. It was only a matter of time."

How had he known? Alice hadn't known. Alice hadn't wanted to know. She hadn't wanted to think ahead to this point, the point where she missed him fiercely despite herself. Even though she still hated him for those bug-eyed looks he gave Fred Andrews.

Maybe if she'd thought she could rip him from Fred, maybe then she would have ignored Hal. But maybe not. FP understood her. But Hal forgave her her sins, the reckless damage she might do to her reputation. So maybe it was obvious who she had to pick.

FP was biting his lip now.

"You're still with the--"

"Yeah."

He gave a low whistle. He was happy when he said, "Knew you could conquer them. Knew you'd make a good snake."

"I'm alright," Alice said.

In gangs, as in life, it didn't do to let people know you liked something about yourself.

"Don't let 'em knock you around," FP advised her. "Or be, you know, sleazes--"

"The sleaze went out with you," Alice informed him.

FP cracked a grin.

"You've always gotta take the shot," he said. "I know that about you."

Alice nodded. 

"They gave me your old jacket, I think."

"Smells like me or something?"

"Exactly. That's why I had to have it dry-cleaned."

FP shrugged again.

"Well, it probably looks better on you, anyway."

Then he shoved his hands in his pockets and started on his way. Alice grasped desperately for something, anything she could say next.

"Is that it?" she called out.

FP stopped.

"Only if you want," he said, after a few seconds. "I'm always around, Alice. Always around if you want me."

-

But that wasn't true, she thought. It couldn't be true. FP wasn't easy to have these days. He was too in-demand. He was Captain of the Bulldogs this year, and so the unacknowledged king of the school. There was talk of him and Fred Andrews maybe being in a band. There was talk about their sharing some kind of van they had bought expressly to impress girls.

"A van?" Alice said.

"To impress girls," Hermione said.

"With a van."

"He and Fred fixed it up this summer," Penelope said. "They call it the Shaggin' Wag--"

"Please stop talking," Alice said. "I get it. Most girls are far too easily impressed."

There were some things she just didn't want to know about, because she wasn't sure she could ever forgive FP for them. Fred Andrews was one. And the steady stream of uninhibited girls at their table -- Cricket, Claudia, Carly Doiley, back to Cricket -- was another.

"Are you jealous, Alice?" Hermione asked.

"Please," Alice said again. "I'm not even his friend anymore."

"That's good," Hermione said. "I've been in the van, you know. _Not_ to do anything. Just because I was fighting with Hiram that week, so it seemed like a good time to try and see the inside. It smelled awful. They've been--" she put a V to her lips, and for a second Alice's mind supplied, _eating girls out? He does love that_ , but then Hermione said, "--smoking pot."

All the girls ringed around Hermione's desk went off into peals of laughter. Alice was annoyed. Freshman year, she might have found that scandalous, but now that she'd smoked plenty herself, not to mention delivered the stuff all over town, she didn't see what the big deal was.

Anyway, she doubted that Fred would ever touch the stuff, after the stink he'd made over the Serpents. She hoped he wouldn't touch it. She hoped FP would find him as boring as ever, even with their football and their band and their ugly sex van.

Even the Serpents talked about it. Most of them fondly. Most of them still liked FP. Mostly because they assumed he'd be back, the thought of a Jones without the gang completely anathema to them. But some of them regarded him bitterly, jealously. Streaky Shore complained that FP sure was getting a big head these days.

"I don't care who he fucks," he said, one night at the Whyte Wyrm. "What is he at the end of the day? A Jones. A Jones, a Jones, just a fucking _Jones_."

He took a swig of his beer and regarded Alice. Alice looked baldly back at him. If it was a challenge he wanted, that was fine. He'd sunk in everyone's estimation, and she'd risen, and she wasn't going to let him get an inch of esteem back.

"He invite you to his party this Saturday, Smith?"

"What?" 

Streaky grinned. 

"His party. Little boy Jones is turning seventeen. Won't make him any more of a man--"

"Oh, like you know the first thing about being a man," Alice snapped.

But he'd struck a vein. She hadn't been invited. Even if FP had known she was going to turn him down, he should have invited her. Alice made her delivery furious that night, and stayed furious while she slept, dreaming of FP sitting there in Hal's basement bedroom, pretending not to notice her no matter how many times she took her top off and put Hal's hands on her breasts.

Eventually she cracked and got FP's new address from Fred. He gave it very graciously, with a warm, "it'll be good for him to hear from you," so Alice looked at him coldly and walked away without thanking him.

She assumed Fred had been invited to the party. But when Saturday came, she found herself in front of a cheap, no-frills kind of house, more modern and less dilapidated than she expected, and Fred's infamous van was nowhere to be seen. Several motorcycles, parked between two pine trees, watched the house. Inside, someone seemed to be playing the kind of rowdy music they always played at the Wyrm. The screen door clanged open and Streaky stumbled out, caught at the chain link fence encircling the little house, and leaned over it like he was considering vomiting.

Alice had been planning to watch for a little while, to make sure Hal wasn't there before she invited herself in. But she knew Hal wasn't there. It seemed FP had only invited South Siders.

She knew what she would find when she walked into his house: booze, sweat, and hash. His kingdom. Not his anymore. But maybe he was returning to it. And maybe a part of her didn't want him to return, because he was FP and it would be nice if he could be more than all this, but another part of her wanted it very much. She walked past Streaky and pushed open the door.

Sweat. Booze. No hash that she could spot, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. Still, as she looked around, a different kind of familiarity took hold of her. FP's new place was small, but it reminded her of something she hadn't seen in over a year. The cabin. The wood-paneled walls, the brightly-painted cabinets. The hurricane lamp in the corner, that seemed to come from another era. 

Alice remembered how she hadn't taken his fixation on the cabin seriously. How she'd regarded it as a joke, when in FP's mind it had been obsession-worthy, a glittering planet. He had recreated it here, as best he could, and filled it up with good times and bad friends. Serpents. A few nodded to Alice as she passed inside. One reached for her sleeve, but stopped when she served him with a glare.

"Alice?" FP said.

"Where's Fred?" Alice demanded, over the music.

FP scowled at his hurricane lamp. 

"He wants a lot from me," was all he said. "And if I fight it -- you know. He thinks it's because he won't like me the way I wanted him to. But it's not about that. He's a stick in the mud sometimes. That's all." 

He was drunk, Alice realized. She didn't want to talk to him in front of the Serpents if he was drunk. He might say something stupid. 

"Ditch your party," she instructed him. 

"What?"

"Come with me. Ditch your party," she said.

FP, ever the oddball, actually obliged her. He pulled a jacket from his closet, beat-up black leather, and then they made their way past a vomiting Streaky, and then he was climbing onto her bike behind her, muttering about the reversal.

"You like this," he said. "I bet you like this. Gotta sit in the back like I'm the girl."

"That's right," she said. "I think this arrangement is perfect."

"I knew it," he said, satisfied.

She felt his fingers tracing the rearing snake head on her back.

"It is the same one, maybe," he muttered.

"Would you just hold on? When I start the bike, you're going to fall off."

He wrapped his arms around her. They were longer than Hal's, and thinner too. Just whipcord muscle. Alice started the bike. She had no real sense of where she would take him. It took passing the gas station, the bank of motels by the Greendale bridge, the perplexing "Florist-Barbecue" sign on South Sugar street, before she realized they were going to her house.

Of course they were going to her house. It was Saturday night. Ann was out with some boyfriend or the other. The aunts were at a bar somewhere. Alice's father was, possibly, dead. Possibly not. But with him you could never tell.

Either way, it was just Alice and FP at the Smith house. The saddest, most sagging house in all of Riverdale, probably, and Alice would know. FP blinked at the peeling siding.

"We'd get it replaced," Alice said. "But probably no one should be touching it. Asbestos."

FP just nodded. This was why he was the only boy Alice would ever let into her house. He wouldn't be bothered by it. He just accepted it. Alice tugged him inside and sat him on the couch while she pulled her jacket off. She found some cow tail candies someone had left in a kitchen drawer and offered them to him. 

"I don't want you to taste like booze," she said. "Caramel's better."

FP rolled his eyes, but obligingly opened one of the packages and started to suck on it.

"You used to be more about imagination," he said, after a few seconds.

"More about imagination? What?"

He waved a perfect, meaningless circle into the air.

"As a kid. Like you were dreaming things. Like you were thinking something really wild. Like you could say anything and it would be really creative. I could tell you had that in you. But now I see you, you know, with halftime-sub Hal, and I can't tell if you're like that anymore."

"You used to be quieter as a kid," Alice told him. 

"I was never quiet," FP said, making his eyes very big, like he was about to launch into a horror story. "Maybe I was quiet outside, Alice, but inside me everything was exploding."

Her too. God, her too. Even when she was quiet, nothing about her heart could manage quiet. Everything inside her unmanageable, untrustworthy, too satisfied with itself to deliver good behavior. Everything inviting catastrophe. The destructive character.

This was why she hated Hal for saying that she couldn't see FP. FP, who was so like her, who was her kin in this way. Hal had no _right_. Hal -- who got queasy when she suggested motorcycle rides, who was self-righteous about stolen money, who had never faced any problem bigger than a chilly Cooper calm -- got her during the day. That should be enough for Hal. That was more than Hal deserved.

"I think I like myself too much," Alice said now, considering things.

FP blinked up at her. He looked dangerously handsome in his soft black leather. 

"No such thing," he said. "I can tell you still have that like, because you always had it, and you should never lose it, Alice. You have to like you, otherwise the whole world will make you hate you. It'll just -- just distort you right up."

Only maybe she didn't really like herself. Sometimes she wanted to destroy herself too. She pushed him back onto the couch, straddled him, and cupped his jaw. FP stared up at her, darkly satisfied.

"Don't say you knew I would do this," she said.

"Wasn't even thinking it," he said. "Was just thinking about how you look at me like you could burn me right up."

He sounded very happy about that, whatever it meant. Alice kissed him. Because she wasn't sure if this was the first kiss in a long time, or the last kiss forever, she was as rough and hungry about it as she liked. Just as rough as girls weren't supposed to be. He tasted like caramel and beer, and his face was in her hands, and for right now he was completely hers even though at school he was everybody's. 

When she'd had her fill of kissing, she let him into her room. Messier than he probably expected, but he didn't say anything. Just let her take off his jacket, helped her pull her sweater off. Unhooked her bra. The undressing was quick and easy. Admiring each other took a little longer. She'd been looking at FP her whole life but had never got to see all of him. He probably felt the same way about her. There was something tender and a little hesitant in how he cupped her breasts, pulled back, dropped a hand to her hip.

"All of you," he told her carefully, "you should like all of you. Because it's all--"

"Available," Alice said, rolling her eyes. Boys just liked 'available.'

"Hot," FP corrected. "I was gonna say hot."

So was he, but then he knew that. Alice pushed him back onto the bed. He was already firming up. Alice leaned over him so that her hair brushed his hip and closed her mouth on his dick.

In front of Ann and the aunts, and even in front of Hal, she pretended like this was vulgar. It made you vulgar. All sex did; that was understood. You gave it to a boy, and once you gave it you could never get it back. 

But she throbbed with want. She wanted, for once, the stupid fantasy they talked about in Ann's trashiest books. Lovemaking. Whatever that was. Hal had never managed it. Hal was solid and dependable and fine enough, but she wanted more than that.

She pulled off when she tasted pre-come on her tongue, when he rubbed softly at her forehead and said, "Alice, if you don't stop I'm gonna--"

"Okay," she said, exhaling. Now he was fully hard. His chest rose and fell in front of her. She passed her nails lightly over it, just because she could.

"I'm going to ask for one thing," she told him carefully. She stretched a hand out now, to her night table. Rooted around until she found lube and condoms and handed them to him.

FP nodded. He slid on the condom and lubed himself up as she watched. Then he just waited, patient despite the obvious need he was feeling.

"Slow," Alice instructed. "Sweet. _Heavy_. You know what I mean?"

She hoped he did. She wasn't sure she knew. It was just that she had a picture in her mind. 

"Angry," FP supplied. "Happy. Untamed."

Those weren't the same words at all, but somehow they were exactly what she meant. She moved off of him, back against the headboard. He sat up fully and faced her, gently pushing her legs aside. She got the sense that he enjoyed touching them. Enjoyed touching all of her. Eyes. Hair. God. Legs. She might have started chanting it at some point, and he joined in, laughing a little.

At some point they stopped that, though. At some point his touches became firmer, and he leaned in to kiss her again. He was still kissing her when he pushed inside her. 

She was wet enough by then that the intrusion wasn't so painful. But it was full. She felt beyond full. FP's hand closed on her hip and he said something low and comforting and nonsensical. He didn't move, though, until her breathing had calmed and she'd adjusted to having him inside her. She clawed at his side a little to get him to move.

What he gave her, then, was friction, fullness, and heat. Slow, like she'd asked. But desiring, too. He dropped kisses to her breasts, and with one hand rubbed at her clit the way he knew she liked. The other hand was a steady anchor on her hip, reminding her to move against him, to meet him. Pressure built in her belly, and further below. Good pressure. Building and building and building. 

It didn't feel vulgar. It felt like something she was wrenching out of the world, _making_ the world give her. FP's body was warm against hers, and she clawed his back, eager, egging him on. When he pulled out, she was so empty her desire seemed to have teeth. When he pushed back in, she felt wicked in a wonderful way, as heavy and full as she'd wanted. 

If this was degenerate, then she'd be a degenerate, and she'd be glad. 

-

In the morning, before anyone was home, she found FP dressed and sucking on a cow tail on the porch. There was a bit of orange sun poking over the horizon, giving her enough light to see his jacket properly. Alice traced the double-snake.

"Are you back, then?"

"What?" he said. "Oh. I don't know. This one was my dad's. That's why it's got the leaders' mark. Fred and I fought about it. He doesn't see the point in me keeping it."

"But it was your dad's," Alice said. 

Fred might be FP's best friend, but Alice understood FP.

"Hey," FP said. "I have something to show you. I was thinking we could go someplace."

"You're riding in the back," Alice said.

"Well, yeah. It's your bike," FP said, apparently less of a prick about gender when he was sober.

"Directions, then," said Alice.

He directed her almost all the way to the main highway to Centerville, but then made her turn off onto a side street. Here the country was craggy and forbidden, boulders hemming in the road. Between the boulders, pockets of flowers tried fruitlessly to defy the late winter chill. Another cold front would come in before spring hit, Alice thought faintly, and it would kill those flowers. She felt a little bad about that. 

FP had her stop when they came upon a sign advertising the next turnoff. It said THE SISTERS OF QUIET MERCY.

"You're taking me to a nunnery?"

"It's not a nunnery," FP said. "Well, not just a nunnery. Come on. We should stash your bike where no once can find it."

They did that, and then it was a half-mile walk to an ugly, frowning kind of building. FP veered away from its large central stair and led Alice along the side. They walked about another quarter-mile, to a place where one of the walls crumbled just enough to leave some very convenient handholds. FP kneeled down and put his hands on his knee to boost her up.

"We're sneaking into a nunnery," Alice said. "I do not sneak into nunneries. I am a better person than this."

"Tell that to your drug money," said FP.

Not that much drug money. And anyway not that bad a drug. Mostly just pot, she thought. Still, she stepped onto his hands and let him help her up the wall. She came down in a brown, bare winter garden. FP climbed over a few seconds later. 

"Oh, Junior," someone said.

Alice whirled around. A very large, white, and weather-beaten statue of Mary regarded her. So did a very small, white, and hunched woman.

"Hi, Cerise," said FP.


	6. The Ruining.

"His father," said Cerise, "took me all the way to California on the back of his motorcycle, back in 1962. Did he tell you that?"

"He didn't tell me anything," said Alice.

This was the eleventh or twelfth time she'd said this. She would have blamed Cerise's age, except that by turns Cerise could seem sharp enough. Alice had asked about the lobotomy and Cerise had said, "oh, Mother just told people that. By that point most right-thinking people knew what lobotomies did to a person, so it was a way of discrediting me. It worked. Blossom schemes usually do."

Something horrible occurred to Alice.

"Are you a Blossom?" she asked FP.

"What?" FP said. "Jesus! No."

That was a relief. Alice wasn't sorry she'd slept with him, but she was relieved not to have slept with a Blossom.

"When I was with FP," Cerise said gently, "he didn't think he wanted children. He changed his mind, of course, when he learned he was having a son."

"Weren't you put away by then?" Alice asked.

Cerise fiddled with her ugly woolen sweater. 

"We met when I was fifteen," she said. "He was much older by then. He had this little cabin. I loved that cabin."

"Alice's been there," FP put in.

Cerise nodded.

"Junior can't investigate which of the Serpents killed his father now that he's no longer in the gang," she said. "He was _sure_ it was a Serpent. It wasn't my parents or brother or nephew. Blossoms -- we want people to know. At least one person to know. So we leave traces. We think we can get away with it even when we leave traces."

Alice pulled in a deep breath, then released it slowly.

"Do you want me to investigate who might have killed him?" she said.

She'd given up the mystery midway before solving it. She knew that. But she'd never been in it to vindicate the first FP. She didn't even like him. She couldn't explain why he bothered her so much, just that he did. She still woke sometimes with her cheat heaving, thinking of the dream where he held that bundle and beckoned to her. 

Cerise looked up. Her eyes were huge and surprisingly alert. 

"He was old, but healthy. He should not have died so easily," Cerise said, with all the same confidence FP had had three years ago. 

FP, though, was lingering now at the edge of the garden, hands in his pockets. He kicked some rocks in the general vicinity of Mary, like he was challenging her to a soccer game.

"I think Alice should leave it," he said. "I think we should all leave it. Could have been Serpents. Could have been the Blossoms. Could have been Ghoulies, even. We keep poking, we make a ghost out of him. I don't want that."

"A ghost?" Alice said.

"Something you don't let die," said FP. "Some panic you cling to. Some nights, when I know there's a problem in my life, when I know it's nothing to do with him, I'll wake up and I've had a nightmare about him. And then it's like everything is about him. And it's not, I bet. I've gotta let go sometime. It's just that I'm _clinging_ \--"

"Alright," Cerise said, her voice small. "So let him die."

-

Alice thought FP must have settled it in his mind, though. Must have come up with an answer. The Ghoulies, that was it. He had to think it had been the Ghoulies. Because otherwise, he never would have agreed to make them take the fall with Stanger. He never would have nodded at the Serpents when he saw his old cronies, like he didn't mind knowing they'd destroyed their mirror-images. 

The old FP would have minded, Alice thought faintly. That sly, always-there FP, very young, who'd had a personal code all his own. That FP was still suspended somewhere inside the new one, but you had to look very hard to find him.

"You used to be more about right and wrong," Alice told him once, on a hot summer night after junior year had ended. He was working construction that summer, and every bit of him was wiry with muscle. Alice traced his collarbones, wondering whether to kiss him there or whether that would give him the wrong idea. With Hal, affection was of course required. With FP, it felt so vital she had to be careful with it.

"I used to be more about right and wrong," he echoed. "Sure. You noticing things about me now?"

"Now?" Alice said. "Don't I always?"

"Nah," FP said, mouth twisting. "Nah, you don't. But it's alright."

It wasn't like Alice could protest. She wasn't supposed to notice him. She wasn't supposed to be with him at all. Wasn't supposed to sneak him into her house when he couldn't pay his water bill, just to watch while he took a shower.

Hal was interning at a publishing house in Centerville that summer. Alice only saw him on the weekends, which were full of bright, straightforward expeditions. They went to the new silver ice cream palace at the North Side mall. They went to visit his grandmother's meticulously restored Victorian cottage, where the parquet was so perfect you were only allowed to walk on little woven rugs. They went to the Cooper fourth of July bash on the lawn of the Journalism Society. Alice helped host. She was included in the family picture. The theme was stars and stripes, because that was the only acceptable theme for fourth of July.

Alice made apple pie, as was appropriate, and pretended she thought it wasn't very good. But Hal's mother said, "No, darling, take pride in yourself," which was something only FP had ever seemed to say to her before.

She was proud. Proud of the day Alice, in her striped blue and white apron. And proud of the night Alice. Night Alice, it had to be admitted, was a freer being. She spent the summer scaling the walls of the Sisters with FP, to visit Cerise. Helping Frankie determine who the Serpents should recruit. 

And fucking. This was, undoubtedly, the summer of fucking. Hal on Friday nights, when he came back tugging on his work collar, eager to get naked and throw her on the bed. Then FP most other days. FP preferred to lie back. Lazily, on his side, with his face buried in her neck so he could kiss her there. Or else looking up at her, his gaze heavy and dark.

"Drinking you in," he'd say with a shrug.

He didn't need to say it. The gaze itself was a language. Sometimes with Hal sex became like something they were reading out of a manual. Now I'm going to do something for you, Alice, so lie down right here. Now I want you on top, Alice, because you know it's been a long week at the office, so it would be nice if you could do something for me. Now I want this. Now I want that.

FP proposed things with touches and glances. A quirk of his eyebrow, while he trailed his fingers down the inside of Alice's thigh. A kiss to the back of her neck when he came out of the shower, his skin hot, her blood hot, everything suddenly so hot that she would get the impulse to throw him on the bed. FP never said, "Now I want this." He only managed to communicate, constantly, "May I? Can I?"

Once, with Hal, the condom broke. Hal said, "Dammit, I wanted--" 

Alice, climbing off him and, feeling annoyed, snapped, "I don't care what you wanted." 

He might be a Cooper with wonderful teeth, a solid internship, and a tremendous stereo system, but she was a Serpent. And that summer she was dangling on top of the Ferris wheel again, proud and happy and reckless.

Ann had always told her that you started with a little recklessness. Just a little. Then you couldn't help but add more, and then a little more. It built up until that was it -- that was your character. That was what people thought about you, and after that you had to drown in it.

On the first day of senior year, Hal brought roses for all the girls in the graduating class, courtesy of the his mother and Register. White for all the other girls. Red for her. Harry snapped a picture for the Blue & Gold. Hal's mother wanted a picture in the school paper. She and Alice had discussed Homecoming at the fourth of July party, over small slices of pie. Two seniors were needed for King and Queen of the court, and the obvious pick would be Hermione and Hiram, but Mrs. Cooper didn't see why they shouldn't propose a pair of underdogs.

"The Blossoms win it every year they've gone out for it," she'd told Alice, her face tightening. 

"Yes, because they're Blossoms," Alice had pointed out.

Mrs. Cooper had arranged her tight face into an equally tight smile. Her hand found Alice's hand. It closed on Alice in a motherly way, a way Alice was unused to and wasn't sure she liked.

"You know we -- people say we feud with them," Mrs. Cooper said carefully.

People did say that. Largely because the Register never printed the rapturous lies the Blossoms forced onto the other news outlets in town. The Coopers were firm, well-established, Lands End catalog people, with the power to always demand the truth.

"We can't let people like that, who are so _proud_ of themselves," Mrs. Cooper said. "think they're the only ones who can win. Can we?"

That pricked at the same old rebellion Alice had felt, back when she'd lost out on the Good Citizens Award. She nodded. She and Mrs. Cooper were in agreement. At school, she accepted the red rose and posed for Harry's picture. Campaigned vigorously for the crown with Hal. It helped that she'd had years to collect every cruel thing Hermione had ever done, to arrange those things in her head. Now she emptied out the whole of it, tossing reminders here and there. Ellie Crump actually burst into tears, when Alice told her how sorry she was about the whole Vixen initiation and how she was absolutely certain Hermione was sorry, too. It was just that Hermione was probably too busy leading the squad to apologize in person.

In all the hubbub, two things fell by the wayside. The first was FP, who would shoot her glances here and there, monstrously dangerous ones.

 _Don't be a lunatic,_ Alice would mouth. 

The other thing was how her period hadn't come. Not since July.

-

She could tell FP or she could tell Hal. It seemed to her that she could not tell both. 

The week before Homecoming, she had FP come to the Whyte Wyrm to walk her home. She'd taken a pregnancy test by then. She knew she was pregnant. But that fact dangled there in her mouth, like it was afraid to come out. They went along Tapping Drive, far out by the edge of town where the forests began. Here there was an old factory remade into a haunted house. There there was a little cabin, painted bright green and bedecked with fake spiderwebs, proclaiming itself an inn. Here an old claw-foot bathtub full of pumpkins and orange leaves, there a false skeleton sitting on a stump, here a garland of dried corn and wheat. 

"Horror season," FP said, bugging out his eyes and lifting his expressive brows. He jostled her. Alice barely registered it. She did agree, though. It was horror season.

"Thanks for getting me and Fred to play the dance, by the way," said FP.

Alice had maneuvered herself onto the dance committee, and mostly hired Fred to discomfit Hermione. She nodded now, once. Above them the trees had gone bare, earlier than they usually did. Their black branches stabbed the sky. Alice thought Hal's neighborhood still had some green ones, some cozy holiday pines or something.

"You're in your head," FP told her. He made a nonsensical circle near his temple.

"It's the dance," Alice said. "I can't lose to Hermione."

She thought FP might say, "I figured. You never like to lose."

Or, "You're competitive. I know that about you."

Or even, "You always gotta ignore me for junk like that. That's how you are."

But instead he picked at the cold, raw skin on his hands and said, "Oh. Nevermind, then. For some reason I thought you were going to tell me some kind of secret."

At that point Alice started shivering, so he slipped off his Bulldog jacket and dropped it over her leather jacket. This did not make her feel warmer. Something was occurring to her, here and now, for the very first time. She liked when Hal dug out her truths. She never felt like FP did the same. But this was because FP already had them -- he never began from a myth.

She felt like crying. Instead she took deep gulps of the unseasonably cold air. She decided she would go to FP's house tonight and kiss him. And the words would stay trapped in her mouth, but maybe he would know, somehow, that this was the last kiss, because he was FP and he was like that. 

"What're you looking at?" he asked her softly, when they'd made it to his house, when she'd pushed him against his headboard.

"You," she managed.

His eyes. His legs. His arms. His dark, dark hair.

"Oh god," she said, and then she was running for his bathroom, feeling the urge to vomit.

-

She told Hal the night of Homecoming, and Hal, with his unerring knack for truth, said, "You want it, don't you?"

Of course she did. Of course she did -- that was why she'd chosen him so long ago, and that was why she still chose him now. She did not want to raise a child that was afraid to love itself too openly, that skulked and sneaked, that would have to watch everyone else take all the awards. She didn't want a child that would die alone underneath a thin blanket. She didn't want a child with cold hands and no gloves. She had learned to be reckless for herself, and loved that. But she could not be reckless with a child.

If she was going to have a child, then she wanted to be able to call Lands End or J. Peterman or one of those fantasy companies, and place an order for the kind of life other people seemed to have.

She stared up at Hal, assessing. For once she felt like she could get nothing out of him. With his stretched-thin smile and near-colorless brows, she couldn't tell if he was charming or monstrous, tender or offended.

"Let's be smart about this," he said. He said it very calmly. She couldn't understand how he could be calm when inside her there were things exploding. 

"Smart?" she said. She heard her voice rising. It was ruining everything, ruining the scene she and Hal made, him in his navy blue tux, her in her navy blue tulle. "What was smart when the condom broke and you wanted to keep going--"

"Well, I am a man," Hal said, like this was a defense. He was coloring now, mildly pink face swelling with blood. She was glad. She needed a fight. 

He said, "Look, we'll take care of it--"

"Damn right you'll take care of it!" 

He'd give it his perfect Christmases, his apple pie parties. She wasn't going to accept any less. She would stand firm on that point. She was perfectly still and tall when they crowned her, that coiled-up anger inside her propping her up. She smiled at the crowd. At Hermione (who did not have a crown, but did not have a bun in the oven, either, so possibly Hermione was the real winner here). At Fred Andrews, clapping politely at her win, and at a completely disinterested Mary. Even at FP.

He was looking right at her. She faltered for a second. She gathered herself a second later.

Yes, she thought. Yes, I'm going to kill what I have with you. The way you killed your younger self already, and I killed mine. These things are cyclical.

And she and Hal fought in the car on the way home, and all through the weekend. He was so soft and stupid that he couldn't fight properly, though. He brought in reinforcements. Hector called her at her home number and told her to be sensible. Harry spoke to her at school, and explained that maybe things were done a certain way on the South Side, but that would not be the way they were done in the Cooper family.

Mr. and Mrs. Cooper confronted her in their airy family room, right in front of the stereo system, and told her how much they liked her and how much they hoped she would trust their son. They had recommended that Hal take responsibility and make her an appointment. So Hal had made her an appointment.

"An abortion, you mean," Ann said tiredly, when Alice finally told her.

It was night. They were at the Crossroads. The neon sign shed a sickly glow on them. Alice hugged her knees and wondered when she would stop feeling ill, feeling like there was something wrong.

"Is it really his?" Ann asked shrewdly.

"What do you mean?"

Ann looked like she would say the name. But she didn't. FP's name would change the tenor of things, would wrench Alice away from where Alice needed to be. So Alice saw her swallow it, saw it go down her white throat in a lump.

"You can't say no to Hal," Ann said. "He may not want it, but he still likes _you_ \--"

"I refuse to say yes to Hal," Alice said.

Once the appointment was made he had returned to his sturdy, dependable calm. He held doors open for her unnecessarily. Pulled out seats. Put his arm around her shoulder, solid and heavy. 

The day after she told Ann, he insisted on walking her back from Pop's after work, insisted they take the scenic view along the gardens of Maple Street. Here, in the heart of the North Side, there were still some late-blooming flowers, but they were dying fast. The sidewalk was strewn with golden leaves and purple-blue petals. 

"You are going to show up, right?" Hal said. "To the appointment, I mean."

Alice wanted to hit him. Alice wanted to upend her milkshake all over his coat. But these were South Side reactions, and Hal would be impervious to them. He might even take a strange power from them. He would be the righteous North Sider then. She'd just be a crazy bitch from the South Side.

Silence. That was the ticket.

"You _are_ going to show up," Hal said again.

She kept walking, silent. He couldn't catch a lie if she said nothing, anyway.

Hal stopped. 

"Alice," he said. "Aren't you worried about what people will think?"

Of course she was. Of course she was, because she knew what they would think. 

"Polite people will treat it like an accident," she told Hal. 

"Will they?" Hal said. 

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's just that it's an accident if you're nice. If you're a good girl. But we both know you're not, Alice."

Alice's turn to stop. It had begun to rain on Maple Street, since they'd started walking. First a little patter and then more, until now it was thoroughly wild with fat, cold droplets. The wet should have burnished Hal's magnificently fair hair, but instead it just plastered it. He did not look like something in a catalog.

She'd never wondered what he saw in her. She supposed she'd known. Hot at home and prim at school. Good grades, but good at sex. Hardworking, but frequently in need of his help. Complimentary when on his arm, aware of the unspoken social rules, not prone to flirting. Never likely to pout in public, when he got awards and she didn't. A screaming mess only when other people weren't looking. A girl to sit in the stands, away from the Vixens, because the Vixens were for the whole team but Alice Smith was just for him. 

Her nails dug into her palms.

"Other people don't know you like I know you, Alice," Hal said, at ease. "Maybe you could be happy with them thinking you'd made a sad mistake. But you and I know you make them all the time. You were a Serpent. You tried to take money that wasn't yours. You--"

He broke off, laughing a little.

"--you were friends for years with _FP Jones_ \--"

"What's your point?" Alice demanded.

"One mistake is an accident," Hal said. "But all of them lined up, all of the clues put in place? That won't look like an accident to people. That'll look like just another problem child from the South Side. A slut trying to trap one of the Cooper boys. So you should think really hard, Alice, about whether you want that to be you."

Her hands hurt. They were bleeding.

"I'm just being honest with you," Hal said.

-

She had a place she could go. She had money from the Serpents, and would have still more money once she sold her bike. She had to act soon, though, before she showed too much. She had to control this. 

But when she knocked on FP's door, Claudia Valentine opened it. 

"Alice?" she said. 

Alice tried to understand whether it was better or worse that Claudia was wearing her Vixens uniform. Better, surely better, because it told you right away what kind of girl Claudia was. Vixen. Harlot. A wild thing of the kind FP Jones favored.

Worse, because the uniform was maybe the only difference between them. Alice breathed out hard.

"Get out. I have to talk to him," she snapped.

Claudia's eyebrows climbed up almost to her hairline.

"You can't boss me around--"

"I'll tell everyone you were smoking pot and touching his limp, sad excuse for a dick. Don't think I won't," Alice said.

Claudia cleared out. Alice entered FP's kingdom, dimly-lit except for the blaze of the hurricane lamp against the painted kitchen cabinets. There was the sound of taps being turned on and then off before FP emerged from the bathroom.

Alice couldn't look at him. He'd look good, because he was FP. He'd look furtive, but handsome. Dark. A little unpredictable, like he might have something tucked in a corner of his mouth, either a growl or a smile. No way to tell which until he set it free.

Alice focused on the discarded cans and broken bottles on his kitchen counter. She had an urge to clear them out.

She said, "I need your help--"

"Saw you arguing with Hal at Homecoming," said FP.

It was not a smile he had for her. It was a growl. Alice realized that he was breathing heavily.

"You're drunk," she said.

"Takes a few more than that," FP said. "You got something you want to tell me?"

She didn't. She was focusing on his ugly little box of a home, so like the cabin on the mountain. The cabin halfway out of town. And this house was not rotting yet, no, but it would be. Rotting floorboards, cluttered dry weeds, asbestos in the siding, and a flat grey stone in the yard. Alice choked down her bile.

"Aren't you going to say anything?" FP demanded. "I heard you talking to him, Alice. Don't you think I at least deserve the same--"

"It has nothing to do with you," Alice said. She thought her hands couldn't take any more abuse, so she'd shoved them in her pockets, but now they were just twisting up the fabric there. FP leveled a finger at her.

"Don't lie to me," he said, in an ugly voice. "Don't you damn lie to me--"

"Why are you ruining everything?" Alice demanded.

"Ruining what?" FP said. Now he was gesturing at the whole room. Sweat, booze, the smell of weed. 

He was right. Maybe there was nothing to ruin.

"Never mind," Alice said. "Forget it."

" _You_ forget it," FP said stubbornly. "You forget it. You just try, and see if that works for you. See, I know you. You act like you don't like me the same as him--"

"I don't!"

"You do," he said. "You do. You like us both. You like boys. That's what makes you horrible. Not for the reasons you think, not because it's dirty or South Side or whatever you have in your head. It's because you like us like how a shark likes blood."

-

Even without FP's help, she was at the Sisters of Quiet Mercy before Christmas. When Cerise learned, she bobbed into Alice's room, eyes huge, wrinkled hands twisting anxiously at her heavy sweater.

"Is it Junior's?" she said.

"No," Alice said, "Excuse me."

And then she called for the nearest Sister and explained that there was a problem with the wall in the back garden, that an intruder might get in that way. 

She didn't want to see FP. She didn't want to see Hal. She didn't want to see anything but her quiet, uncluttered little room. Cleaner and neater than home. The wind sobbed at her window all winter, but could not get in. She felt like nothing and no one could get in. It was oddly comforting.

The counselor at Riverdale Middle School had said that it was trauma.

 _Trauma warps, Alice_. 

She wondered if it was like the warping that was happening now. Everything swelling, her balance skewed. Thinner hair but clearer skin. She no longer liked her breasts as much, but she liked the swell of her stomach, the surprising kicks, until she remembered she could not keep it. She could not keep it and she could not tell anyone that she had made this life, and then refused to keep it. You shouldn't tell, when catastrophe came knocking at your door. Not even if you had invited it in yourself.

At night, she dreamt she was pulling back the blanket. Her father was sobbing on the couch. Ann was not home yet. The little end table was strewn with pills, pills Alice knew she was not supposed to touch. Beneath the blanket was her mother; with the little blue bundle of Allan; with the waxy blood collecting around her mouth--

"You're here," said the counselor, "because of what happened with your mother and the baby."

But her father just said, with those great ugly tears cloaking his role, "I didn't say he wasn't mine. I just said he might not be. I named him, didn't I?"

Afterwards, people had pitied him. That was what had hit Alice. People pitied him, and they did not pity her mother, because her mother had been vulgar. Because it really might not have been his. 

-

Cerise would ask, "Is it Junior's? Is it Junior's?"

"Why'd you come back?" Alice would ask in turn. "After he kidnapped you. If you were friends, why did he give you back?"

"Is it Junior's?" Cerise demanded. "His father didn't want children until he learned he was having a son. Do you think it's Junior's? You know they won't blame him. Is it his?"

"I don't know," Alice admitted finally.

There was a special sin in the uncertainty. But Cerise seemed determined to make her say it anyway.

"You'll know if his hands are cold," Cerise said. "They're all born cold, the Joneses. They need warming up. I always used to have to pile blankets on FP in the night. _He_ didn't want children until he learned he was having a son, you know."

Alice regarded her. Cerise was old, but not so old. Not so old as she seemed, maybe. Cerise in her bare winter garden, with its crumbling wall, dreaming of that bright cabin, certainly seemed hunched and old. But she wasn't what she seemed. Alice was learning that she was brisk and capable, always there to put a hand on Alice's forehead when she had nausea, to call Mother Superior when Alice woke in the early hours of the morning.

"What happened to the son?" Alice tried.

"Out and about," Cerise said vaguely. "Somewhere. He wanted it, you know." 

"And you?"

"Oh, by the time I stopped listening to him and started listening to myself," Cerise said, "it was too late to do what I wanted. So they put me here." 

"Away from FP," Alice said, voice faint. "Whose hands were always cold."

"I used to have to pile blankets on him," said Cerise. "In the night."

-

Ann came to visit. Only Ann, mostly, except that in April, when Alice was most heavy and miserable, she also brought Frankie Valdez. 

Frankie said, "I'll handle the gang. It's just time to shed your skin, that's all. If a snake can't do that, that's a dead snake." 

He avoided looking at her, with the shyness Alice had noticed older men sometimes had. That was how you could tell they'd never been like Hal or FP. They'd been something else. Too strange, maybe, to slide into normal society and trap a girl. Though now Frankie was sitting very close to Ann. Too close. Alice stared.

"The Sisters say they have a very good family," Ann said, from behind her fall of fair hair. "I thought that was good. Otherwise _we_ could--"

"No," Alice said. Her voice came out harsher than expected, because it was echoing the resounding, immediate no in her head. 

"If I'd wanted him to be raised by people like you," she said. "I'd just raise him myself."

He was born two weeks later. Her water broke in the garden. Mary, with all her features destroyed by weather, made no comment at all and was in fact completely useless. 

"Aw, bitch," Alice said, so that even Cerise looked alarmed. 

It was Easter, the one time the Sisters permitted anything like frivolity, largely because Easter frivolity took a harmless form. Nauseating chocolate-custard eggs and yellow marshmallow birds. 

"It's a chick," Alice told the baby. "It's a chick like you."

The baby was fat, calm, and still profoundly interesting. That last trait could not come from Hal, and the first two could not come from FP. Alice could hold him in only one arm and float the bird above him, and watch the way his eyes tracked it wonderingly. He hung on her every movement. She hung on his every breath. At no point that week did they fall out of sync, but then they took him away. 

Alice couldn't destroy him or throw him away, so she arranged a small place in the back of her mind where she would keep him, the place she reserved for all the truths she didn't want to say. When she returned to school, the year almost done, she put 'medical condition' on her reenrollment form and let Ann invent the details. 

"She'll have to repeat the year," the secretary told Ann pityingly. "But I guess that's meningitis for you."

If FP had a reaction to this, she never learned it. He'd been caught with the Serpents and expelled some time in March. He was working construction full time now, people said. Hermione and Penelope and the Coopers all discussed this like they'd known it was inevitable. They seemed grateful, though, that he'd waited to show his true colors until after football season was over. 

"I mean, at least he had that last game," Hermione said magnanimously, because she was up against Mary for the Exemplary Character award, and clearly intended to win it. "That really was a wonderful game."

Fred Andrews sat alone at graduation, looking a little shellshocked still by this turn of events. No one paid attention to this but Mary, who had always been a little contrary. 

Hal filled Alice's locker with flowers and dedicated his salutatorian speech to her, and then assisted Weatherbee when Weatherbee gave Alice the Exemplary Character Award, for almost dying of meningitis and then coming through in the clutch. Ellie Crump grabbed her arm and cooed about it, it was so romantic. And afterwards Hal came to Alice's house in his best navy suit, tugging at his collar, and introduced himself to Ann and to the aunts and pretended her father wasn't too drunk to hear him when Hal said what a fine daughter he'd raised. 

"I missed you like crazy," he said. "I can't be without you, Alice. You wouldn't believe how tough it's been for me."

He didn't question the story about meningitis. It turned out that he didn't want the truth, not if it was going to make him uncomfortable. 

-

Hal went to Riverdale State after winning a scholarship he didn't need, and Alice joined him a year later with a slightly smaller scholarship. 

She had better grades in many subjects. She was smarter. All the teachers liked her better. But she'd never had time for as many extracurriculars as Hal, and she'd never been able to afford the expensive prep courses he'd had. 

"It's not my fault my parents thought I should be prepared," Hal told her, with perfect honesty. "Or that you were working all the time."

And because her scholarship didn't cover all her tuition, Alice had to work through college too. Which meant she didn't get to write for the Riverdale State Bulletin, and she didn't get an article into the Centerville Chronicle before Hal. By the time the Chronicle accepted her first Letter to the Editor, Hal had already written three. He went to the best journalism program in the state. Alice went to the second-best. The Coopers glowed with pride for both of them, but Alice knew they would not have glowed so much if things had been fair. 

"He's so lucky to have you," Mrs. Cooper said that July. "And you're so lucky to have him."

That was a lie. Alice didn't point it out. But it was at least half a lie. 

Hal wanted her, had chosen her. Because she was good looking and because she came from nothing, because she couldn't outshine him, even though he was the most boring and solid of the Cooper boys and would probably work at the Register someday. Because he'd need something exciting to put on his Christmas cards. 

They got married once he graduated from journalism school. Not because he graduated. Even Hal knew that wasn't the reason. The real reason was that by then her father was dead and she'd lost touch with the aunts, and Ann and Frankie had sold the house and moved out of state. Alice had no intention of inviting them to the wedding, and anyway they couldn't afford to come, so the ceremony was small and intimate and North Side only. 

"Perfect," Mrs. Cooper said, sobbing, when they exchanged vows. 

They would be the couple in the catalog, crisp and flat and attached to each other always, whether they liked each other or not.


	7. Epilogue: In Another Country.

Once, their car broke down in a bad neighborhood by the Hillside highway. 

Hal was out in a flash, delighted to play with the problem. He left Alice sweating in the front seat. It was August and very hot, and she was very pregnant. In the back seat, Polly was crying. Alice knew she was just hungry. She rooted around in the diaper bag for Polly's bottle. 

"Good girls don't cry, sweetheart," Hal said loudly, from where he was tinkering with the engine or something. 

Polly still cried. Alice found her bottle and gave it to her. 

"That's my girl," Hal said. "Listen to daddy."

Alice felt a headache coming on. Polly was quiet and good now, but Hal was clanking and swearing with evident joy. 

"Hurry up, Hal," Alice said, and he ignored her. He would probably tell people later that she had nagged him. Him, the genius with cars. Him, such a genius that he didn't care how long she and Polly had to wait with the air conditioning off. 

He took his genius time, as expected. He upended enough of the car that other cars began to slow down and ask questions of him. This was the South Side, where people liked a spectacle. And here they had Hal, who was so used to being boring that he enjoyed being the center of attention. 

A few people offered to help. Hal happily turned them down, all except for a green pickup Alice only vaguely registered from the corner of her eye. 

Finally, she thought. She spared the green car a glance before turning the page of her magazine. There was a woman -- a girl, really -- reading the same magazine over there. The one with the MILES AND SIERRA AND THEIR NEW BABY cover story. 

How did he trap you? Alice thought idly. How did you trap him?

But that was obvious enough by the size of the girl's belly. 

Hal was laughing and joking along with whoever had stopped to give him a hand. Alice poked her head out of the window to tell him to hurry up. Then she wished she hadn't. 

FP leaned against the hood, talking to Hal. He flashed his teeth at Alice, a languid attack. Alice found herself breathing hard. 

But he did not come say hello until he and Hal had fixed whatever was wrong with the car. While Hal was whooping and explaining whatever had happened to the thoroughly uninterested girl in the other car, FP came around to her side. He stood a little ways off, not looking at her directly. She could still look at him, though. At his thin, muscled arms, the sharp line of his jaw, the rich gleaming brown of his hair in the sun. 

"Nice to see you around the old neighborhood," he said. 

"What do you want?"

He held up his hands, like she was the one attacking him. 

"Just being polite. Don't worry. I won't stay long. Me and Fred, we've got a huge job in a house across town. Your hair, though. Blonde, huh? Looks nice, even with the roots. Gladys' are the same. She stopped dying her hair because of the baby--"

"Don't you have to go work on the pope's house or something?"

He stopped. Good. His hands twitched a little, with anger or humiliation or who knew what. 

She never had been able to tell. Not with him. She took in the stains on his t-shirt, the stubble on his jaw, the junk food cartons strewn across his dashboard, the trapped girl. 

She had never quite been able to read him, but she'd been able to predict him. She'd known what he would be, someday. 

When he turned away, she exhaled, relieved. 

He stopped. Looked back at her. Waggled his index finger back and forth. 

"You know in those nice clothes, nail polish, with that fancy purse, I can hardly recognize who you are now, Alice--"

"Good."

"But," FP said, voice sharp. "I know who you used to be."

He probably guessed that this would frighten her, and it did.

-

When Polly was caught kissing a boy at school, Alice made them transfer her to the other class and as a precautionary measure took Polly to the barber and made her get a bowl cut. 

When Betty was caught making late-night shadow puppets for the Andrews boy next door (nice, solid, dependable), Alice instituted curfews, earlier bed times, and banned the use of night lights.

Hal bought them short skirts, ill-thought-out bikinis once the summers hit. Alice made sure the school secretaries measured their hemlines, and once, in a fit of rage, waited for a fourteen year old Polly at the bottom of a Ferris wheel. When her seat finally came down, Alice pulled her out and frog-marched her to the car, yelling for Betty and Hal. 

Betty's eyes were wet at the thought of missing the fair. She didn't cry, though, because she knew good girls didn't. Polly was white and enraged.

"I'm not taking my bikini top off, and don't even think about making me put on a shirt," she said.

"You are thirteen," Alice said icily. "And people can see your breasts."

"I like my breasts--"

"No," Alice said, in a warning tone. "No nice girl likes her breasts."

"That's true," Hal put in mildly. 

When Betty reached thirteen, she at least understood.

"I hate them," she told Alice, in the dressing room of the department store. She was as fair as Hal, as fair as Ann, so her humiliation made a scene, a full-body flush.

"You just need a bigger cup size," Alice told her reassuringly.

"When will I stop hating them, though?" Betty demanded.

Alice laughed a little.

"Stop feeling a little uncomfortable, you mean?" she said. "That's perfectly normal. That's how you're supposed to feel."

Betty looked unconvinced. Alice put her hands on Betty's shoulders and regarded the picture they made in the dressing room mirror.

"That's how you're supposed to feel," she said again.

"But _you_ don't hate yourself."

Alice saw the way her own mouth thinned.

"I take pride in the appropriate things," she said.

-

Looking after her daughters. Keeping a tidy house. Nice dinners, excellent fourth of July parties, beautiful holiday cards. 

Beyond that she couldn't say, exactly, that she liked herself anymore.

-

They found out about Polly's condition the day after Betty left for her internship. 

Ann, who was fond of Betty, who was always begging for more pictures of both girls, called and asked to speak to her, and Alice said, "Sorry, she's gone already."

"You said she was leaving today."

"No I didn't, Ann. I said it was yesterday, because it was yesterday."

She couldn't remember if she'd given Ann the wrong date. She did know that when Ann called for the girls, her heart would feel heavy and wrong, and she'd find ways to cut the conversation short. Ann had a distressing tendency to open sentences with, _you know, your mother, when she was your age--_

But Betty was gone and Alice didn't want to disturb Polly. Not yet. She hadn't made arrangements for Polly yet. After checking to make sure that Polly was still sleeping, she locked herself in the family room and gave Ann a brief summary of the problem.

Ann sounded like she was breathing hard. 

"Does the past ever go away?" she said.

Alice rooted around in the corner desk until she found her old address book. L M N O P Q. 

There. The Sisters of Quiet Mercy.

"Does it?" Ann demanded. "Does it ever die?"

"It does," Alice said. "If the present cuts its throat."

**Author's Note:**

> The hazing scene is taken from Dazed & Confused. In chapter 2, FP reads the Christopher Marlowe epigraph at the start of Eliot's poem _Portrait of a Lady_. The Crossroads exists mostly because I really enjoy reading [Motel Register](http://motel-register.com/). Names are taken liberally from the wikipedia entry for Archie comics. The title is from an episode of The Twilight Zone. 
> 
> ETA: Also, it took me a little while to remember where I'd seen FP's cabin, but now I remember. FP's cabin is a much, much more battered version of [this](https://www.oldhousedreams.com/2017/08/28/1930-naches-wa/).
> 
> The final exchange is stolen from Leonora Carrington. I read it and thought it was perfect for this Alice, so I took it.


End file.
